Wolves Eat Dogs - Martin Cruz Smith

Renko Returns - yes he does., or rather did, in this taut thriller from 2004. Truth be told, Renko has returned several times since Gorky Park made Smith an international bestseller back in 1981. Better to say, this is the first of a later career series which also includes Stalin's Ghost and Tatiana, both reviewed here. It is definitely the first Renko novel set after the collapse of the USSR.

This an stunning idea. A couple of New Russian zillionaires get killed. Both are connected to the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster, thus Investigator Renko is despatched to Chernobyl by his boss, who is ever-keen to get rid of him. I don't know how he does it, but Smith conjures up an absolutely convincing world that has developed in the radioactive shadow of the breached reactor in its vast concrete and steel sarcophagus. Supposedly a Forbidden Zone, Renko finds a unique community of natives who never really left and chancers from the outside world.

The mystery, as ever, runs deep. Smith handles it with the wit and grace of a true master. There is a secondary revelation in the final pages, a device I have never seen before. It almost passed me by. Then I realised, and my jaw dropped. A must-read for any self-respecting fan of the genre.

Kolymsky Heights - Lionel Davidson

Is Kolymsky Heights the greatest thriller ever written? That is always going to be a subjective question. Objectively, though, no one can deny Davidson's immediately post-Soviet techno yarn should be in the running.

Davidson is an unusual figure. He had a forty-year career and was always successful, but he only seems to have produced eight novels, of which Kolymsky Heights is the last. I remember reading the penultimate, The Chelsea Murders, in the early Eighties, but have never even seen the others in a library or bookshop.

You can see why there was a sixteen year gap between Chelsea and Kolymsky. The amount of research must have been colossal, let alone developing a hero capable of delivering linguistically, ethnographically and physically. Davidson's novels all seem to have different heroes, which probably contributed to the lack of productivity. The thing is, I suspect he wrote constantly - there is sixteen years' worth of writing on every one of the nearly 500 pages.

Basically, odd-ball academic Porter is asked to go undercover in the vast secret area of Siberia to contact a Russian scientist who everyone thought was long dead. There is a secret in the secret lab. The secret is revealed perhaps two-thirds of the way through and is rather touching in the way it is handled. The book is about the adventure itself - getting to the secret lab and getting back out again, which effectively involves traversing the biggest country on earth both ways. There is plenty of action, a convincing love affair, and, above all, lots and lots of thrills.

Kolymsky Heights is a classic novel of its time and of its genre. Is it the greatest? Quite possibly. The other seven novels are must-reads for me.

Tatiana - Martin Cruz Smith

Like everybody else, I read Gorky Park when it came out thirty-plus years ago. I later read Stallion Gate, which I loved. I wanted to read Rose but never came across a copy. And now here is Tatiana from 2013 and Arkady Renko, hero of Gorky Park, is still going strong.

He's had a tough time in the intervening thirty years. For one thing, time runs differently for him and he is only perhaps a dozen years older than he was in Gorky Park. He has a bullet rattling round his skull and an adopted sort-of son. He may have had DS Victor Orlov as a sidekick in the old days; if so, I don't remember. Orlov is the cop other writers would have made their protagonist - dark, drunken, violent, but rock solid on the side of the angels. Cruz chose Renko, the outsider, the man of principle, who could have risen to the top of the tree if only he had been prepared to play dirty.


Russia, of course, has changed completely since the Eighties. For one thing it's Russia instead of the USSR. Those who would once have risen to power through the Party, now rise through gangsterism. Mob bosses are billionaires. Honest cops and investigative journalists, however, remain the enemies of the state.


Tatiana is an investigative journalist. She has jumped to her death from her rundown apartment. Renko doesn't believe it. It is not his case. He is supposed to covering up whoever it was shot billionaire hoodlum Grisha Grigorenko. Tatiana and the late Grigorenko lead him to Kaliningrad, the capital of organised crime, where he also commits to solving the murder of a high-price interpreter by a man driving a butcher's van with a happy plastic pig on top.


It's the story details that make Cruz Smith's novels stand out from the rest. Here, amongst many others, we have the Ferrari of sports bikes, chess hustling, the interpreter's personal shorthand system. Some of the characters are more interesting than others. You've just got to love a capo di capo called Ape Beledon. Most important of all is the authorial control. He has a lot of material - he is determined to explore the psyche of his hero and, to a lesser extent, those close to his hero - but he never forgets that this is a thriller. It's purpose is to excite the reader. Which it certainly does. Pure reading pleasure.

Our Game - John le Carre

First the Wall came down, then the Soviet Union fell apart. The Nineties were a decade in which old enemies lost their edge, former certainties simply evaporated. Eastern Europe suddenly comprised new counties and potential states we had never heard of and knew absolutely nothing about. Chechnya, South Ossetia and, most relevant to le Carre's 1995 novel, Ingushetia - which I have still never heard of.

Many spy writers went out of business overnight, or turned to period espionage fiction. Le Carre, the great master of the form, used his genre to explore the uncertainties. Tim Cranmer is an old-style spy - Winchester, the Treasury - put out to grass. Fortunately he is stinking rich, his inheritance including a Somerset manor and vineyard. His schoolfriend Larry Pettifer, the enfant terrible of Soviet Studies in his day, was Cranmer's agent and later double agent. Old Wykehamists look after one another, and Cranmer has found flighty Larry a sinecure at Bath University. Larry has repaid the favour by absconding with Timbo's trophy girfriend Emma. Then Larry is reported missing. The police call on Cranmer. This comes as surprise to Cranmer, who thought he might have killed his friend some weeks before he went missing.

Has Larry gone back to the Game? Has he involved Emma? Cranmer sets out to find them, his quest taking him from Paris to the wild homeland of the Ingush. I'm not sure that the enigma is ever fully resolved  but what we do get is a vivid picture of one of the world's largest landmasses, a political empire, at the moment of implosion, and the black hole lurking beneath.

Our Game is not le Carre's finest novel. It is not an easy read - it is by no means an easy subject - yet it contains some of the master's finest writing.  He has to stretch his vocabulary in order to pin down the themes that emerge as the exercise progresses.  It is therefore a key work, not only within le Carre's oeuvre, but within the spy genre itself.

And this cover, on the Penguin Classic ebook, has to be the best of any le Carre ever...