Havana Bay
by Martin Cruz Smith, Lipper/Viking; ISBN: 0345390458)
Week 21 (Nov. 25th, 2002)

      I'm sure this will come as a shock, but big New York publishing houses make mistakes, just like the rest of us. Tony Hillerman, for instance, was told with great editorial authority that no one would ever be interested in reading a mystery set on a Navajo reservation.

      Martin Cruz Smith is another famous example. In the late 1970s when he was first trying to peddle the adventures of Arkady Renko, an angst-ridden Moscow policeman, several New York companies assured him that he had dreamed-up an interesting character, but Americans simply wouldn't go for a mystery novel set in the Soviet Union. Random House eventually took a chance and the result was "Gorky Park," published in 1981, a huge international bestseller which was made into a movie a few years later.

      Martin Cruz Smith pulled off quite a magic trick in "Gorky Park." After precisely two weeks of research in Moscow, he was able to capture the mood of the Soviet Union in its last corrupt, crumbling days -- a feat which even Russian writers admired, shaking their heads in dismay, left to wonder how a Yank had beaten them to the punch. As a detective hero, Arkady Renko was perfect: a guy with just the right amount of disheveled honor, a romantically wounded knight in rusty armor who longs to bring justice to an unjust world.

     After "Gorky Park," Smith wrote his second Arkady Renko novel, "Polar Star," which was nearly as good, this one set on a Soviet fishing trawler in the Arctic Sea. But then a terrible thing happened, an author's worst nightmare: the crumbling Soviet Union went the way of all flesh and collapsed completely. Martin Cruz Smith had lost his setting! Imagine Agatha Christie with no English village, or Dick Francis with horse racing forever gone. What was Smith to do? Was Arkady Renko finished, defeated at last -- not by the many bad guy he had vanquished (and some bad girls, too), but by history itself?

      I had a chance to meet with Martin Cruz Smith over lunch in Marin County a number of years ago and he assured me that he went through some furious re-writing and re-thinking. The first result was "Red Square," Arkady Renko in a post-Soviet Russia with new corruption to combat. In my opinion, this is the least successful novel of the series; without the old guard communists on his heels, Arkady seemed a bit lackluster.

      A number of years went by. Smith published an historical mystery novel, "Rose," a very fine book set in 19th century England. And then finally, in 1999, came "Havana Bay," resurrecting Arkady Renko and bringing him to Cuba, another crumbling communist world, this time with a Latin beat – a stroke of genius.

      I picked up a paperback of "Havana Bay" recently, published by Ballantine, and I can announce that Renko is back and better than ever. Still disheveled, pining for his dead wife, beset by corruption on all sides, the displaced Moscow policeman is right at home in the Cuba of today. The story is not remarkable; it's solid, but it's the atmosphere you remember. As he did in "Gorky Park," Martin Cruz Smith brings Cuba alive in all its seedy, steamy glory. And Cuba is fascinating.

      I'm always on the lookout for an intelligent, well-written mystery that keeps you turning pages. Martin Cruz Smith is simply a wonderful writer and I recommend him heartily -- all of his books if you haven't discovered him yet. But if you're ready for palm trees and complex international politics, and the decaying, languid glamor of Havana, "Havana Bay" is a thriller you should not miss.