Martin Cruz Smith, 1942-2025

I was digging myself out from the bottom of the 270 or so emails in my inbox when I came across this press release announcing the recent death of acclaimed and accomplished author Martin Cruz Smith:

~~~~~~~

We at Simon & Schuster are saddened by the death of Martin Cruz Smith, who passed away peacefully on Friday, July 11, surrounded by those he loved. We offer our condolences to his family and to his many loyal readers who have enjoyed his work over the last half-century.

Smith was a writer accomplished in nearly every genre—westerns, horror, historical fiction, and of course mysteries. He was a recipient of the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award as well as several international mystery prizes, and he has been acknowledged as an inspiration by many bestselling authors including Lee Child and Slow Horses novelist Mick Herron. Smith’s eleven-book series featuring Moscow detective Arkady Renko—beginning with the 1981 publishing phenomenon Gorky Park and concluding with Hotel Ukraine, just released last week—is one of the great achievements in modern suspense writing, with the Washington Post hailing it “a work of art” and the Denver Post claiming, “Along with icons like Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, and Sam Spade, Akrady Renko has become one of the finest fictional detectives to prowl the literary landscape.”

For the last three decades, Smith lived with Parkinson’s, and he innovatively incorporated the condition into the more recent Renko novels, with his protagonist facing it as courageously as the author himself. As Smith writes of Renko in Hotel Ukraine: “He could stay at home, do nothing, and surrender as his symptoms got worse…He was defined by who he was and what he could still do. Put that way, it wasn’t even a choice.”

“The same was true of Martin Cruz Smith,” says Sean Manning, Vice President and Publisher of Simon & Schuster as well as Smith’s editor. “He was a writer, and he did it beautifully and valiantly until the very end.”

As his wife Emily Smith notes, Smith was also “a beloved husband, father and grandfather; an adventurer, traveler and researcher; and a man of deep humanity, humor and insight. He felt that he was the luckiest man alive.”

~~~~~~~

It was impossible to grow up as a bookish person in the 1980s and not know of the cultural impact of Mr Smith and, in particular, Gorky Park. But even as a mystery reader whose father loved bringing home airport paperbacks, I somehow never got around to reading any of the Arkady Renko books until 2023’s Independence Square, which was nothing short of a revelation to me. I still have the follow-up, Hotel Ukraine, on my very long TBR list, but spoke glowingly of it in my roundup column of barely two weeks ago. I noted in my brief description that I hoped that it wouldn’t be the final book in the series, as it was being billed. It is doubly sad that Mr Smith’s passing is the reason the series is over, but a blessing to us all that his courageous body of work remains.