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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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070389
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07038900.022
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1990-09-22
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BOOKS, Page 63Murder at SeaBy Paul Gray
POLAR STAR
by Martin Cruz Smith
Random House; 386 pages; $19.95
In Gorky Park (1981), Martin Cruz Smith showed a good way to
turn one among the thousands of detective novels published annually
into a runaway best seller. The three crucial steps: 1) construct
a plot with plenty of corpses and exfoliating complexities; 2)
provide a beleaguered and therefore sympathetic hero, one whose
problem involves not only solving a crime but avoiding
extermination by a small army of people who do not wish the truth
to be known; 3) set the action in a place that is inaccessible and
romantically forbidding -- in the case of Gorky Park, Moscow and
environs.
These days, the Soviet Union and its capital evoke less mystery
and fewer perturbations than they did eight years ago. Gorbachev
and glasnost have helped see to that. But Smith's formula for
success ought to remain valid if a suitable substitution can be
found for step 3. In Polar Star, Smith finds it. One dead body
leads to others, along an arc of increasing menace and violence.
Arkady Renko, the intrepid police investigator of Gorky Park,
reappears, again called to rescue a situation that shadowy,
powerful forces may not want to be saved.
Only the venue has changed. Instead of Moscow, Renko must
navigate the intricacies of the Polar Star, a huge Soviet factory
ship plying the waters of the Bering Sea. Its mission is both
prosaic and delicate. It must gather and process 50,000 tons of
seafood to contribute to the nourishing of the Soviet people. But
its suppliers, who do the actual fishing in exchange for cash, are
American trawlers.
This joint commercial venture between historic enemies takes
place in one of the earth's chillier, less hospitable locales. And
when a huge net full of an incoming catch drops the body of Zina
Patiashvili onto the deck of the Polar Star, the whole enterprise
becomes icier still. Patiashvili had been a popular member of the
Polar Star work force, dishing up food in the mess and making
herself available to a goodly number of male comrades on board and,
so rumor has it, to more than a few visiting American fishermen.
Her lifeless reappearance raises a number of troubling
questions. Murder? Bad. Suicide? Much better. In the good old days,
the inconvenient matter could have been put on ice until the ship
returned to its home port of Vladivostok, where the official party
whitewash would have explained everything. Not now. The ship's
captain understands the new realities: "The problem is the
Americans. They will watch to see whether we conduct an open and
forthright investigation."
That calls for Arkady Renko, who happens, by chance and Smith's
ingenuity, to be a lowly worker on the ship's "slime line," hacking
up fish and hunkering down from further recriminations for his
dogged sleuthing in Gorky Park. Convinced that his investigating
days are over, Renko neither seeks nor wants this assignment, which
threatens his anonymity and possibly his safety. Significant people
on the ship would also like to see him remain hidden and humbled.
One of his enemies-to-be reminds him of his expulsion from the only
group that truly matters in the Soviet Union. Renko replies,
"Membership in the Party was too great an honor. I could not bear
it."
Renko's laconic sense of the ridiculous endeared him to
millions of Western readers during his last adventure and will no
doubt do so again. "In irony," he remarks about his homeland, "we
lead the world." There is, it must be added, something incongruous
in a character who so diligently labors for a political system that
tries to crush him. When one character asks why he so stubbornly
pursues the facts, Renko replies, "That's a mystery to us all." And
hardly the only one in this action-heavy novel. If anything, the
plot of Polar Star can seem, to the jaundiced eye, a trifle rigged,
with shocks occurring at metronomic intervals. Such objections,
though, are likely to crop up only when the novel has been finished
and set aside. In the full rush of the chase, Smith and Renko still
seem irresistible.