{"id":4683,"date":"2019-04-24T09:49:54","date_gmt":"2019-04-24T13:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=4683"},"modified":"2019-04-24T13:32:16","modified_gmt":"2019-04-24T17:32:16","slug":"must-read-books-about-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/must-read-books-about-russia\/","title":{"rendered":"Must-read Crime Fiction About Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em>, 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.\u00a0 Even rarer: wanting to re-read a whole series.<\/p>\n

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,<\/em> 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.\u00a0 It charts the very uneven path of Arkady Renko, a public investigator who is surly, cynical, defiant and heedless of consequences.\u00a0 His father was a famous or infamous general during World War II, depending on who’s talking.\u00a0 General Renko likely committed war crimes but also helped save the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

Arkady is nothing like the general and the name is a burden to him.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This passage from the most recent book, Tatiana,<\/em> deftly places Arkady in his milieu:<\/p>\n

A golden youth, son of an infamous general, he had floated easily to the top.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Somehow, he had wandered.\u00a0 Almost all the cases that came his way were fueled by vodka and capped by a drunken confession.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 Instead of bending, he pushed back, and so guaranteed his descent from early promise to pariah.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Renko gets himself transferred from Moscow to a small town in Stalin’s Ghost<\/em> 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.\u00a0 Leaving Moscow, there’s no<\/p>\n

Mercedes, no Bolshoi, no sushi,. no paved-over world; instead mud, geese, apples rolling off a horse cart.\u00a0 No townhouses in gated communities, but cottages shared with cats and hens.\u00a0 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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:<\/p>\n

“Life would be wonderful without vodka.\u00a0 But since the world is not wonderful, people need vodka.\u00a0 Vodka is in our DNA.\u00a0 That’s a fact.\u00a0 The thing is, Russians are perfectionists.\u00a0 That’s our curse.\u00a0 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?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s also stark poetry in his prose.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael is teaching a mystery writing workshop in June at writewithoutborders.com<\/a>.\u00a0 He’s the author of 26 books, including the just-published State University of Murder<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[877],"tags":[1797,219,1795,1751,1799,397,903,1800,1798,1801,122,1711,1796],"class_list":["post-4683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-arkady-renko","tag-crime-fiction","tag-drinking","tag-martin-cruz-smith","tag-moscow","tag-mystery","tag-russia","tag-russian-billionaires","tag-russians","tag-soivet-union","tag-suspense","tag-ussr","tag-vodka"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4683"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4705,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions\/4705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}