One of these millionaires, a physicist, takes a dive out of the 10th-floor window of his luxurious, state-of-the art apartment in what looks like a case of suicide, except for the puzzling detail of a closet full of salt. The new Russia is distinguished by its youth and brains, with fabulous fortunes scammed from the bankrupt state. The latest investigation is less of a murder inquiry than an exploration of what has changed since Gorky Park. Generally overlooked but the most interesting and original was Lionel Davidson's Kolymsky Heights (1994), which broke away from the riffs which Cruz Smith did better than anyone. Robert Harris used it for Archangel, Boris Starling in last year's Vodka and Donald James's version in Monstrum and the Fortune Teller read like a cross between Rose and Gorky Park: Dickens with cars. Russia has become a popular writers' destination since Gorky Park, and all more or less owe their inspiration to Cruz Smith. The template was, in fact, a well-tested one: stick your copper in a foreign setting, crank up the local atmosphere, and offer more of the same. Gorky Park extended the downbeat romanticism of Le Carré to incorporate Russian soul, a quality not associated with the American crime school, and was also a great piece of travel writing. His cleverness lay in the way he set a police procedural in territory associated with espionage. Reagan was re-stoking the embers of the cold war but Cruz Smith was alert to the first signs of thaw and glasnost and a growing curiosity about the old enemy. In an essentially conservative genre, Gorky Park's Russian setting was imaginative and, given the political climate of the time, radical. Gorky Park (1981), his biggest success, has also been his millstone as he has felt bound to return to the Arkady franchise because that's what is expected, rather than novels set in England, Tokyo or, in what was neither one thing nor the other, Arkady in Havana - the equivalent to Miss Marple being posted to Barbados by Christie for A Caribbean Mystery. His infernal Wigan had the precision of a Gustav Doré engraving. He excels at closed worlds that are imagined rather than grindingly researched. Rose, his least characteristic work, was set in 19th-century Wigan, a town he never visited. Martin Cruz Smith's Moscow in Gorky Park was, famously, the result of a brief Intourist trip.
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