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.
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