USSR

“Old Flames” is Splendid Cold War Crime Fiction

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Scotland Yard’s Inspector Troy isn’t your typical cop. His roots are Russian, his brother’s a baronet, he owns a mansion, and he sees England in 1956 through a very particular lens.  Though his father urged him to “play the game” and learn how to be English, he doesn’t care about cricket or football–or what people think of him either. His wry observations about post WWII-Britain, its feckless leaders, its people and how they speak are priceless:

“Troy loved ‘stands to reason’–it was, when used by a certain kind of idiot, specially bred by the English, the signal, the preface, to the preposterous to a statement that would, beyond a shadow of a doubt, be quite devoid of reason.”

A surprising pair of leaders starts the book on its long and compelling voyage into crime: Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin.  They’re respectively the First Secretary of the Communist Party and the Soviet Premier though Khrushchev is truly in charge and bullies his comrade.  The men are on a deeply boring whirlwind state visit, and because Troy speaks Russian, he’s been assigned as one of six members of a British security team.  All of the men secretly speak Russian and the government hopes that they’ll  catch the communist guests saying something worth spying for.

Troy is assigned to Bulganin but in a powerful and comic scene insists on accompanying Khrushchev.  His interactions with “K” are surprising, entertaining, and move the book forward at breakneck speed before Troy actually gets to investigate any murders. This is a delicious choice that Lawton’s made because it goes so much against the crime novel formula of finding a corpse in the opening pages–or at least the opening chapter.

And speaking of corpse–I was delighted to learn that in England that word can be a verb.  According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it means “to start laughing in a way you cannot control during a performance, or to make someone else do this.”  That actually once happened to me in London at a performance of a P.G. Wodehouse adaptation where I laughed so hard I slid out of my aisle seat.  The actors saw me and cracked up too, followed by the whole audience.

The verb corpse is apparently used by actors and performers, again er the Cambridge Dictionary, and it fits this novel perfectly because for Troy, being British is a performance.  You might find yourself corpsing yourself at the antics of Troy’s busybody twin sisters Masha and Sasha.

Lawton has been compared to John Le Carré and that’s not remotely hyperbolic.  His work is richly layered, beautifully written, and has a sense of majesty.  His ability to capture the atmosphere of a period rivals Alan Furst’s and Troy’s irony reminds me very much of Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko  series.  That’s a hell of a combination.

Old Flames is a novel to savor, offering a window into another world that couldn’t be more real and compelling.  There were many lines and even whole scenes I had to re-read because they either made me laugh or because they were so perfectly realized I was in awe of Lawton’s skill.  Lawton’s minor characters are Dickensian, and that even includes an athletic pig.

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, Bibliobuffet, Jerusalem Report and a handful of public radio stations in Michigan.  He’s the author of the Nick Hoffman mysteries.  His mother was born in St. Petersburg and her father was in the first Russian Revolution and escaped the Bolsheviks with his wife and infant daughter.

Russia and Martin Cruz Smith

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Once American intelligence agencies verified that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, it behooved all thinking Americans to inform themselves about our long-term enemy, an enemy many of us thought was no longer a potent threat. The invasion of Ukraine and the recent suspicious Siberian death of Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s foremost opponent, makes educating ourselves even more pressing.

You couldn’t start anywhere better than with the crime novels of Martin Cruz Smith. They present a wide-ranging, richly-textured portrait of the ailing, corrupt Soviet Union collapsing and slowly turning into an even more corrupt, money-mad Russian kleptocracy. A country that undermines American democracy in profound and devilish ways, like supporting the current Speaker of the House with campaign donations.

The touchstone for all this upheaval is the cynical, battered hero Arkady Renko. Renko should have risen much higher than he has as a police inspector, because his father was a famous general in The Great Patriotic War (WWII).  But he disobeys orders, won’t cut corners, and won’t accept cover-ups. In other words: he’s honest. It hasn’t done him any good in the old order and it’s even less helpful in the new one where everything is for sale. In fact, it almost gets him killed more than once.

His latest dangerous case sends him to Siberia in search of his testy journalist girlfriend Tatiana who’s risking her life researching a story about oligarchs and oil–and much more than she’s let him know about. Siberia is “where strange things happened and stranger things were just around the corner…It was a zone on the edge where planes of existence overlapped.  Nothing was inexplicable.”

But everything is potentially lethal.  When Arkady lands in the grim Siberian city of Chita, the chatty cab driver laughingly warns him, “Don’t go by first impressions.  It gets worse. A few days ago an oil tanker on a train headed to Moscow exploded two kilometers from the station.  It went up in flames for no good reason. They say you could have seen the blast from the moon.”

Renko asks if that happens often there and the driver says, “It’s Chita. Anything can happen.” And anything does, as Arkady is the subject of more violence in this book than ever before, or perhaps more accurately, violence unlike anything he could have imagined.

I’ve read all of the previous novels twice and look forward to reading them again. They’re beautifully written, but not in such a way as to interfere with the narrative. Every word serves the story, like these quietly ominous lines from  Three Stations: “Yegor’s name was like a drop of ink in water. Everything took a darker shade.”

Line by line he’s also one of the funniest novelists we have, and Renko’s sly insolence when dealing with his nasty boss Zurin is one of the highlights of the series. Their barbed relationship doesn’t prepare you, though, for a shocking request Zurin makes near the end of the book that could not only change Renko’s life but change the course of Russian history. And while the characters may be fictional, their prototypes are not.

“Brilliant” may be an over-used word for  reviewers, and so is “stunning”–but both of them fit.  There’s more to say than that, however. Martin Cruz Smith has been writing an epic history of contemporary Russia that should have earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature by now. ★★★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other publications, online journals, and radio stations.  He is the author of 27 books in many genres.

Review: “The Siberian Dilemma” is a Must-read Thriller

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Once American intelligence agencies verified that Russian interfered in the 2016 election, it behooved all thinking Americans to inform themselves about our long term enemy, an enemy many of us thought was no longer a potent threat.

You couldn’t start anywhere better than with the crime novels of Martin Cruz Smith. They present a wide-ranging, richly-textured portrait of the ailing, corrupt Soviet Union collapsing and slowly turning into an even more corrupt money-mad kleptocracy. The touchstone for all this upheaval is the cynical, battered hero Arkady Renko.

Renko should have risen much higher than he has as a police inspector, because his father was a famous general in The Great Patriotic War (WW II).  But he disobeys orders, won’t cut corners, and won’t accept cover-ups. In other words: he’s honest. It hasn’t done him any good in the old order and it’s even less helpful in the new one where everything is for sale.  In fact, it almost gets him killed more than once.

His latest dangerous case sends him to Siberia in search of his testy journalist girlfriend Tatiana who’s risking her life researching a story about oligarchs and oil–and much more than she’s let him know about.  Siberia is “where strange things happened and stranger things were just around the corner…It was a zone on the edge where planes of existence overlapped.  Nothing was inexplicable.”

But everything is potentially lethal.  When Arkady lands in the grim Siberian city of Chita, the chatty cab driver laughingly warns him, “Don’t go by first impressions.  It gets worse.  A few days ago an oil tanker on a train headed to Moscow exploded two kilometers from the station.  It went up in flames for no good reason.  They say you could have seen the blast from the moon.”

Renko asks if that happens often there and the driver says, “It’s Chita.  Anything can happen.”

And anything does, as Arkady is the subject of more violence in this book than ever before, or perhaps more accurately, violence unlike anything he could have imagined.

I’ve read all of the previous novels twice and look forward to reading them again. They’re beautifully written, but not in such a way as to interfere with the narrative. Every word serves the story, like these quietly ominous lines from  Three Stations:  “Yegor’s name was like a drop of ink in water. Everything took a darker shade.”

Line by line he’s also one of the funniest novelists we have, and Renko’s sly insolence when dealing with his nasty boss Zurin is one of the highlights of the series.  Their barbed relationships doesn’t prepare you, though, for a shocking request Zurin makes near the end of the book that could not only change Renko’s life but change the course of Russian history.  And while the characters may be fictional, their prototypes are not.

“Brilliant” may be an over-used word for  reviewers, and so is “stunning”–but both of them fit.  There’s more to say than that, however.  Martin Cruz Smith has been writing an epic history of contemporary Russia that should have earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature by now.

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other publications, online journals, and radio stations.  He is the author of 26 books in many journals and teaches creative writing online at writewithoutborders.com.

Must-read Crime Fiction About Russia

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I’ve lost track of how many mysteries and thrillers I’ve read, and not just because I’ve been reading crime fiction since junior high. I also spent a good decade reviewing crime fiction for The Detroit Free press, everything from best sellers to European mysteries in translation. I’ve even taught crime fiction courses and workshops, but it’s rare when I want to re-read a book in this genre.  Even rarer: wanting to re-read a whole series.

But Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkendy Renko series is just that good and I’m almost halfway through for the second time. Starting with Gorky Park, which was a film with William Hurt, the series of eight books is set in Russia before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.  It charts the very uneven path of Arkady Renko, a public investigator who is surly, cynical, defiant and heedless of consequences.  His father was a famous or infamous general during World War II, depending on who’s talking.  General Renko likely committed war crimes but also helped save the Soviet Union.

Arkady is nothing like the general and the name is a burden to him.  But then so is the stupidity and cupidity of his superiors, and the slovenly work other cops do. Renko is a classic outsider even though he officially works for the government and often finds himself being warned off cases or sidelined in some way.  This passage from the most recent book, Tatiana, deftly places Arkady in his milieu:

A golden youth, son of an infamous general, he had floated easily to the top.  By now, he should have been a deputy minister or, at the very least, a prosecutor, ruler of his own precinct and feasting at the public trough.  Somehow, he had wandered.  Almost all the cases that came his way were fueled by vodka and capped by a drunken confession.  Crimes that displayed planning and intelligence were all to often followed by a phone call from above, with advice to “go easy” or not “make waves.”  Instead of bending, he pushed back, and so guaranteed his descent from early promise to pariah.

Renko gets himself transferred from Moscow to a small town in Stalin’s Ghost for complex reasons and the drive to tiny Tver is the opportunity for him to reflect on how Russia is two very different countries, one wealthy and one anything but.  Leaving Moscow, there’s no

Mercedes, no Bolshoi, no sushi,. no paved-over world; instead mud, geese, apples rolling off a horse cart.  No townhouses in gated communities, but cottages shared with cats and hens.  No billionaires, but men who sold vases by the highway because the crystal factory they worked at had no money to pay them so paid them in kind, making each man an entrepreneur holding a vase with one hand and swatting flies with the other.

Cruz Smith’s dialogue in every scene crackles, especially when people are talking about today’s Russia or what they consider timeless characteristics of its people. Here’s his heavy-drinking police comrade Victor discoursing about the national drink:

“Life would be wonderful without vodka.  But since the world is not wonderful, people need vodka.  Vodka is in our DNA.  That’s a fact.  The thing is, Russians are perfectionists.  That’s our curse.  It makes for great chess players and ballerinas and turns the rest of us into jealous inebriates. The question is not why don’t I drink less, it’s why don’t you drink more?”

There’s also stark poetry in his prose.  Here’s Arkady discovering a nemesis on his street: “It was 2 a.m., the hour between sweet dreams and dark despair, a time to pace the floor, not the sidewalk.”  Or thinking about the runaway kid he’s in effect adopted: “Zhenya was Pluto, a dark object detectable more by its effect on the planets than by direct observation.”

Every book in the series is dark, deep, thought-provoking and a voyage into a country whose history, culture, and current political and social reality we need to understand much better than we do.

Lev Raphael is teaching a mystery writing workshop in June at writewithoutborders.com.  He’s the author of 26 books, including the just-published State University of Murder.

Travels Through Europe’s Troubled Borderlands

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I was born in New York City to immigrant parents, and when I was young, the question “Where do your parents come from?” wasn’t an easy one to answer.

My father grew up in the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia which had different names over the course of his youth: Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Carpathian Ruthenia, and the Carpatho-Ukraine. But it didn’t belong there anymore. It had been absorbed by the Ukraine and was now part of the USSR.  His country of birth doesn’t exist anymore, either: it’s now two nations, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The city my mother grew up in northeastern Poland was Wilno, but as Vilnius, it was the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. In her years there as a child and a young woman before the Holocaust, it was variously part of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania, but for the majority of those interwar years a Polish city. It was also twice invaded and ruled by the Germans in her lifetime.

Both my parents spoke a bewildering array of languages and lived in “borderlands,” as Pulitzer-winning author Anne Applebaum calls them in her dazzling travelogue Between East and West.

Blessed with fluency in Polish and Russian, the author records amazing interviews and fascinating, lost history as she travels from the Baltic to the Black Sea, visiting almost two dozen cities like Odessa and Minsk whose names are well known in the West. But she mainly stops at smaller cities and towns that have been swept up in endless wars, invasions, and border changes. En route, she also traverses some areas of Eastern Europe likely unknown to most Americas, each with its own dramatic, many-layered history: Ruthenia, Bukovyna, Moldova.

Some cities have been crushed by neglect, Sovietization, bombing—or all three. Others seem like lost jewels. Everywhere she goes, people from peasants to professors open up to her to reveal contradictory identifications. Russian speakers across these lands, for example, might think of themselves as Ruthenian, Polish, or Ukrainian. The locales she travels through have known immense suffering and chaos, and many of her interviewees come across as shipwrecked. Best of all, her grasp of complicated history in every location is faultless. She’s as observant, canny, and in command of just the right quote or anecdote as Rebecca West was in her masterpiece about the Balkans, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

Here she is in discussion with a fascinating Ukrainian linguist with a Turkish surname who tells her he feels like an outsider in his own country:

“And that, he said, was the most Ukrainian thing of all: to read the history of your country as if you were reading it through an outsider’s eyes. It is the fate of borderland nations always to know yourself through the stories of others, to realize yourself only with the help of others.”

Between East and West is one of the most compelling and thought-provoking travelogues I’ve read in years—and vitally important cultural/historical background now that places like Crimea and Ukraine keep blasting into the news.

A veteran of university teaching, Lev Raphael now offers creative writing workshops online at writewithoutborders.com.  He’s the author of the forthcoming mystery State University of Murder and 25 other books in a wide range of genres.