John Burdett

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.

Continue Reading »

Pages: 1 2 3

Riot Act
Reviewed by John Burdett

Sunday, July 25, 2004

It is a matter of legend that Walter Mosley’s career took off one fine day in 1992 when Bill Clinton named him as one of his favorite novelists. Mosley fits squarely within the tradition of African American authors writing about race and blackness and has been compared to Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man). In an interview with the New York Times recently, Mosley said: “I have never met an African American who was surprised by the attack on the World Trade Center. Blacks do not see America as the great liberator of the world. Blacks understand how the rest of the world sees us, because we have also been the victims of American imperialism.”

Continue Reading »

Pages: 1 2 3 4