Author Returns to His Soviet State of Mind

Martin Cruz Smith fully realizes what people might conclude when they learn he’s living in Marin County--”that I’ve gone all to hell, and I’m on my third wife whose name is Turquoise.”

With redwoods and a creek inhabited by crayfish in his front yard, the place is, indeed, a long way from the small Manhattan apartment where he lived when he created the Soviet equivalent of Sam Spade in the 1981 literary hit “Gorky Park.”

A Whodunit Sequel

But despite the trappings, Smith, 46, remains the sort of family man who runs off to pick up his son, a recent graduate of first grade, from day camp. His wife’s name is Emily. More important to his reading public, he has given new life to Arkady Renko, the cynical homicide investigator-hero of “Gorky Park,” in a whodunit sequel titled “Polar Star” newly out from Random House.

There is, however, one change in his life that he finds disconcerting. He has become what he calls an “author of perestroika. “ Soviet authorities had banned “Gorky Park” when it came out. Now, in the era of openness, the ban has been lifted, and the book is being serialized in a Soviet journal.

Smith returned to Moscow for two weeks last month as the guest of the publisher. It was his second trip there, and first in 16 years. After “Gorky Park,” he couldn’t get a visa until glasnost. On this trip, he even had audiences with law enforcement officials in Moscow.

They knew of the past reaction to “Gorky Park,” in which detective Renko, monitored at every step by the KGB, forms a partnership with an American cop to solve a triple murder in Moscow’s Gorky Park.

But while the themes of oppression and corruption grated during the era of Leonid Brezhnev, the position on Smith’s work has changed under Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. One of the officials with whom Smith met went so far as to tell him that “Gorky Park” was attacked because it “was the only book that told the truth,” Smith said.

“It was nice to hear, but it made me feel greased. It felt like I was having butter applied to all sides. You should wonder why when that is happening,” he said.

He doesn’t know why he was welcomed so warmly, though he is convinced that the Soviet Union’s general effort to improve relations with the world outside is a “desperate attempt on their part to leap forward into the 20th Century.”

He made the trip before “Polar Star” reached bookstores and doubts the Soviets knew about his latest book when they granted him the visa. He worries, though only briefly, that the criticism of the Soviet system in it will mark him again as an anti-Soviet writer.

As he did in “Gorky Park,” Smith in his latest crime book homes in on the Soviet people’s struggle to get by in an oppressive system. There’s also a good deal of debunking of glasnost woven into the 386 pages of detective story set aboard the fictional Soviet fishing vessel Polar Star.

Plot Threads Left Hanging

“Gorky Park” had concluded with Renko’s fate left unclear. He had run afoul of the KGB, stood by as a comrade defected, and freed valuable sables that had been the motive for the crime he solved.

When Smith came up with the idea of using the trawler as the setting for the new book, he placed Renko in the bowels of the vessel in the Bering Sea, cutting up fish on a conveyor belt called the “slime line.”

The book opens with a net filled with fish being hauled aboard the Polar Star. As the fish flop about, the body of a crew member, ensnared in the net, unexpectedly appears. The captain takes Renko from the slime line and asks that he employ his detective’s skills to investigate the woman’s death.

“It is a mid-course book, as this ship is in mid-course, as the society is in mid-course. The trip is not the beginning or end, but the midpoint. If people find that fascinating too, that’s the most I can hope for,” Smith said.

He predicts “Polar Star” won’t have nearly the impact of “Gorky Park” in the Soviet Union, simply because “Gorky Park” was the first time an American novelist had successfully written about life in the Soviet Union in such a humanizing manner.

“If they could ignore the work, they would,” he said.

Smith began his career as a reporter at small newspapers, a television station, and the Associated Press in his home state of Pennsylvania. But he found the wire service’s requirement that he write “with great chastity” difficult to adhere to, and left in 1968 for New York for a job as an editor for a publisher of men’s magazines. From there, he began writing paperbacks, producing more than 30, most of them under pen names, some of them attaining some success. One book, “Nightwing,” became a movie of the same name.

Several Pseudonyms

Now a financial and literary success, “Bill” Smith finds it a bit hard to recall some details of his lean years of the 1970s. Did he use Jake Logan as his pseudonym for his Westerns and John Slocum as the hero, or was it the other way around? He can’t quite recall.

He does remember Simon Quinn, the name he used for the “Inquisitor” thrillers for Dell in the 1970s. “They weren’t bad,” he said. “They got better as they went along. . . . But as they got better, they sold fewer.”

The paperback covers would promise readers an “enormous amount of mindless violence and sex.” But alas, he is “only good for so much mindless violence and sex and then plot starts to appear.”

He hit on the idea of setting a book in the Soviet Union after talking with Soviet emigres whom he had befriended in New York. He used his two-week trip in 1973 to gather more of a feel for the place. From his Soviet friends and his trip, he reached one central conclusion: no one had written about the Soviets “the way it should be done.”

“It is as if you had heard about the sea all your life and you finally went to the beach and you got in the water and realized, ‘No one said it was salty.’ Maybe it was too obvious.”

As Smith saw it, the obvious that other writers had overlooked was the “enormous sense of oppression . . . knowing that you are going to meet resistance every step of the way, getting to work, buying food, buying clothes, reaching an honorable accommodation with your private life and public life.”

Eight-Year Project

He undertook an eight-year project that produced “Gorky Park.” When it came out to great acclaim, he told an interviewer that all he wanted from his success was a house in the country for his two daughters and a chance to write what he wanted. One daughter is in college, the other in high school, and his son, born while “Gorky Park” was on best-seller lists, is entering second grade. He and his wife, Emily, have their country setting, 20 minutes north of San Francisco.

His next book was “Stallion Gate,” in 1986. The book was set in New Mexico with a Pueblo Indian--Smith is part Indian--as his detective and the Manhattan Project as its backdrop. “Stallion Gate” reached best-seller lists, but only briefly, unlike “Gorky Park,” which stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 45 weeks.

So it made some sense for Smith to return to the Soviet theme that won him such success. The seed for “Polar Star” came in a news item about a joint fishing venture between the Soviets and United States in the Bering Sea. He sought help from a Soviet embassy to get aboard one of the Soviet ships, but was refused. So armed with a magazine assignment to write about this “piece of the Soviet Union floating around,” Smith set out for the Aleutians in the hope of talking his way aboard a Soviet ship.

When one of the Soviet ships docked at Dutch Harbor, which forms one of the scenes in “Polar Star,” Smith took the captain to dinner and made his pitch. The meeting went well, he thought. On the following day, the captain gave him a tour, seemingly taking him to all parts of the ship. But the captain also seemed “nervous.” As it turned out, the captain had an old American magazine on board that had a picture of Smith and an article that mentioned “the anti-Soviet novel, ‘Gorky Park.’ ”

Despite his fears, the captain agreed to take a chance by letting Smith aboard again for the night. He and the captain agreed that when the Soviet ship left port, Smith would sail on an American ship into international waters and then transfer.

Things ‘Fell Apart’

“On the way there, the Soviet embassy caught up with us. Everything fell apart,” Smith said.

In all, Smith spent parts of two days on the Soviet ship. But he managed to pull together enough detail to make it seem in his book as if he had sailed on the Polar Star for months.

Smith, who has given up trying to learn Russian, is amused that he sometimes is mistaken for a Soviet expert. He makes no such claim.

“People say I catch the subtle nuances of Soviet life. It’s not subtle at all. What I catch is what a 3-year-old who doesn’t speak the language catches,” he said.

He also relies on Soviet friends who read the manuscripts for mistakes of perception. For maritime detail in Polar Star, he relied on a former Soviet sea captain who had defected in the 1970s.

For what he hopes will be his third book with a Soviet setting, Smith has had better access to the subject country. On his recent two-week trip to Moscow, he spent four days touring the city with a Soviet detective, and interviewed a chief prosecutor for serious crimes of corruption, fraud and bribery. He found Moscow to be far more complex on the second trip.

In a square near the Kremlin, he said, hundreds of people gather daily to debate the issues of the day. A few blocks away, there are vanloads of militia. One Soviet official he spoke to assured him the militia was protecting the demonstrators. But a less official source said that “10 days previous to my asking him this question, special troops had in fact beat on a number of these demonstrators.”

Ever the crime writer, Smith was struck by Soviet criminals who seemingly have become far more organized in their effort to supply consumer goods that the state cannot seem to provide. In an auto-parts store that was run by one of the gangs, consumers could buy replacement gaskets. Outside on the street, they could purchase a car.

“It was a traditional mafia scene--a whole lot of big men with nothing to do all day, standing out on the curb,” he said.

At first, he assumed the Soviet gangs were cheap copies of U.S. gangs, and not nearly as dangerous. Then he and his interpreter ventured to a restaurant that served as a front for one of the tougher gangs.

“We were being refused entrance and I was trying to get us in,” he said. He recalled telling the maitre d’: “ ‘We just want to eat lunch. You’re a restaurant, we’re hungry, let’s eat.’ ”

When a group of large men started coming up behind him, he suddenly lost his appetite. It will all be grist for the what may turn into a third book with Renko as the hero.

He’d also like to return to Moscow, perhaps as early as this winter. He has never seen Moscow in the winter. And, with a deep laugh, he added, “There’s that one place I want to get into,” the restaurant that doubled as a gang hangout.