Washington Post review: Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith
Hazardous Material
Reviewed by John Burdett
Sunday, November 28, 2004
The hero of Martin Cruz Smith’s Wolves Eat Dogs, Arkady Renko, comes with one of the most illustrious pedigrees in thriller fiction.
Many storytellers saw in the Cold War an opportunity not seen since Homer sang the siege of Troy, but, so far as I know, Smith was the only American writer who dared think out of the box to the point of making his hero a genuine communist. And what a magnificent protagonist Arkady is: zealous investigator for the state prosecutor in Moscow, a Russian to his fingertips, wittily acerbic, sickly pale, rail-thin because he is nourished mostly on nicotine, deeply committed to the lost egalitarian principles of socialism and therefore at odds with both the Party and the West, sardonically pursuing his true love, Irina, across oceans. We come across him first in that towering work Gorky Park, where Smith revealed another talent that set him apart from the rest: a passion for authentic detail.
After a raft of near-death experiences, a fugitive Arkady re-emerges in Polar Star as the lowest ranking seaman on a Soviet factory ship, where life is even tougher for a man of integrity than in Moscow. From the frozen wastes of the North Sea he takes us to opulent West Germany (Red Square), where Irina is inclined to dump him in favor of better-dressed men. By the time we get to Cuba (Havana Bay), Irina is dead and Arkady suicidal. Now, inevitably perhaps, in Wolves Eat Dogs the haggard but still chain-smoking Arkady takes us for a strictly unofficial tour of the Zone: “One way to look at Chernobyl was as a bull’s-eye target, with the reactors at the center and circles at ten and thirty kilometers. . . . Together the two circles composed the Zone of Exclusion.”