Martin Cruz Smith's Books

Biography

Martin William Smith — Bill to his friends — was born in Pennsylvania in 1942. His father was a Jazz musician and his mother, of American Indian descent, was a jazz singer and a campaigner for American Indian rights. Consequently, he had a more eclectic start to life than many of his peers.

“We certainly had a far more expansive childhood than a lot of folks from that time. We had family in the southwest and the east coast who were from radically different cultures. And for instance, when we went to New York City with our parents, we always searched out ethnic restaurants, which was an unusual thing to do in the 50s.” (The Guardian)

Early Career

Smith went to study at the University of Pennsylvania. He started a sociology course but flunked his statistic paper and majored in creative writing instead.

“It was great… It was like being asked to ride a bicycle when you enjoyed riding a bicycle.” (The Guardian)

After graduating in 1964, Smith travelled Europe, tried his hand at sports journalism, sold ice cream and attempted to become a painter. None of these earned him a living, so he took a job at the associated press.

“[I was] the worst correspondent the A.P. ever had. Every time someone held up a pie-shaped chart of the state budget, I fell asleep.”

Tabloid Journalism

From there, Smith became a tabloid journalist and freelance writer, and in the late 60s, he edited a men’s magazine. It wasn’t a porn magazine but a collection of articles and short stories with the occasional picture of a bikini-clad model. It was here that he worked with Mario Puzo, author of The God Father. He remembers the day he saw Puzo walking down the corridor with a six-figure cheque in his hand and “a grin that met in the back of his throat.” Smith vowed to himself that one day he would be doing the same.

Seventeen Novels In Thirteen Years

Over thirteen years, he published seventeen novels under many different pseudonyms. Most of them sank without trace though there were occasional exceptions. Three of his books were nominated for Edgar awards in the early 70s, but his work didn’t take off despite his efforts. With a wife and two small children to support, money was always tight.

“I was making less money each year, so I bought a movie magazine to figure out what the hell people wanted. There seemed to be lots of killer animals, sharks, bees. I’d seen a newspaper report about vampire bats, so I wrote up a story with vampire bats and some Hopi shamanism, and my agent sold it within a day.” (The Guardian)

The resulting novel, Nightwing, was his first real commercial success. It was also the first time he used the pseudonym “Cruz Smith”. His agent had pointed out six other Martin Smith’s publishing in America at the time. So, to set himself apart, he added his grandmother’s surname — Cruz — to his own.

Arkady Renko

The newly christened Cruz Smith finally achieved notoriety in 1981 with Gorky Park. Smith’s publisher commissioned a story about an American detective who solved a crime in Russia. The plot didn’t resonate with Smith, so instead, he wrote about a Russian policeman, Arkady Renko. The publisher didn’t believe a novel about a Russian would sell and wanted to know where the American hero was. So began a stalemate with the publisher refusing to let Smith have his manuscript back and Smith refusing to rewrite it. The relationship was frosty.

“During the meeting, this guy took off his shoes and socks and started clipping his toenails. That demonstrated their regard for me pretty clearly.” (The Guardian)

It wasn’t until there was a change of personnel at the publishing house that Smith was able to buy back the novel and promote it elsewhere. Ultimately he sold it to Random House for $1 million. They published it in 1981, and it was a runaway success. It debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list, hung onto first place for a week and stayed at the No. 2 position for over three months.

Gorky Park’s depiction of a Russian detective and an American criminal caught the public’s imagination. It was at the height of the cold war, and the novel provided an insight into the culture that Ronald Regan would later call the “Empire of Evil”. The Soviet Union was a country few westerners thought they would ever be able to visit. The depiction is so vivid it is hard to believe that Smith had only seen Russia once. It would have been easy for Smith to resort to cliches, but he thought that the facts were far more striking.

“The research in Moscow consumed only two weeks… I applied for a return trip, but the U.S.S.R. refused me. So I turned to the vast resources of New York: scores of emigres and dissidents. I actually found myself with too much information.”

Soviet Reaction

After its publication, the book did little to improve Cruz Smith’s chances of further research in the Soviet Union. The Soviet press labelled him a graphomaniac, and the Soviet government added his name to a list of agent provocateurs that Soviet citizens were warned to avoid. At one stage, owning a copy of Gorky Park in the U.S.S.R. was enough to have you put in prison. Since then, the regime has changed, and the authorities have allowed its publication in Russia.

The thawing of political relationships has helped Smith write eight more Arkady Renko novels. These he researched with trips to Kaliningrad, a Russian factory ship in the Bearing Straits and Chornobyl.

Historical Political Novels

Martin Cruz Smith’s Books are set in historical and geopolitical hot spots. As well as the Soviet Union, he has written about Tokyo on the eve of the Pearl Harbour attacks (Tokyo Station) and England during the industrial revolution (Rose). He writes about characters sitting on the edge of society, and his later novels are intellectually persuasive, as they are both politically and socially astute. The Guardian proclaimed, “Smith was among the first writers who made thrillers literary”. I’m not so deep; I enjoyed his books because they were convincing.

“There is a relationship of trust between writer and reader, I think. You are walking a curious tightrope in which you maintain your consciousness of reality, of what is actually possible, which you can then manipulate. But if you get that universe wrong, you are just manipulating stupidity.” (Salon)