Martin Cruz Smith, born Martin William Smith (November 3, 1942), is an American writer of mystery and suspense fiction, mostly in an international or historical setting. He is best known for his ten-novel series (to date) on Russian investigator Arkady Renko, introduced in 1981 with Gorky Park. The tenth book in the series, Independence Square, was published in May 2023.
Smith worked as a journalist from 1965 to 1969 and began writing fiction in the early 1970s. He wrote two Slocum adult action Western novels under the pen name Jake Logan.[5] He has also written a number of other paperback originals, including a series about a character named "The Inquisitor", a James Bond-type agent employed by the Vatican; and a science fiction novel, The Indians Won (1970), one of the earliest works of Native American speculative fiction to see wide publication.[6] He wrote three novels in the Nick Carter series.
Smith is best known for his novels featuring Russian investigator Arkady Renko, whom he introduced in Gorky Park (1981). The novel, which Time called the "first thriller of the '80s",[8] became a bestseller and won a Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers' Association.[9] Renko has since appeared in nine other novels by Smith. Gorky Park debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list on April 26, 1981 and occupied the top spot for a week. It stayed in the No. 2 position for over three months, beaten only by James Clavell's Noble House, and stayed in the top 15 through November of that year. Polar Star also claimed the No. 1 spot for two weeks on August 6, 1989, and held the No. 2 spot for over two months.[citation needed]
During the 1990s, Smith twice won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers. The first time was for Rose in 1996; the second time was for Havana Bay in 1999. On September 5, 2010, he and Arkady Renko returned to the New York Times bestseller list when Three Stations debuted at No. 7 on the fiction bestsellers list. His most recent novel featuring Renko is Independence Square (2023).
Pseudonym
He originally wrote under the name "Martin Smith", only to discover there were other writers with the same name. His agent asked Smith to add a third name and Smith chose Cruz, his paternal grandmother's surname.[5]
^Adam Spry, "Decolonial Eschatologies of Native American Literatures," Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture, ed. John Hay (Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 55-67.
