Pierce’s Picks: “Tatiana”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Tatiana, by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster):
American novelist Martin Cruz Smith has had a good run over the last 40 years, turning out such memorable standalone novels as Rose (1996) and December 6 (one of my favorite works of 2002). But it’s been his tales of Moscow investigator Arkady Renko--beginning with the Golden Dagger Award-winning Gorky Park (1981)--that have earned him the most widespread recognition. Tatiana, the eighth installment in the Renko series, finds our cynical sleuth probing the demise of journalist Tatiana Petrovna, who plummeted from a sixth-floor window. Curiously, that tragedy happened around the same time that a deep-pocketed mobster was exterminated. Are these incidents somehow connected? Renko’s struggle to find out sends him to a “secret” Cold War city, compels him to listen to tapes left behind by Tatiana--recordings that expose crimes notably absent from Russia’s official histories, and bring him closer to the deceased--and presents him with a code-filled notebook that might only be deciphered by his chess-hustling teenage associate, Zhenya. Smith’s nuanced portrayal of the New Russia--corrupt and violent, and no less in need of his services than its Soviet predecessor--is as tragic as it is seductive.

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This week also brings us A Nasty Piece of Work (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press), by Robert Littell, an author best known for such classics of espionage fiction as The Defection of A.J. Lewinter (1973), The Once and Future Spy (1990), and The Company (2002). Nasty Piece finds him taking a holiday from that world in order to deliver the oft-amusing, energetic, and digression-suffused adventures of Lemuel Gunn, a cynical ex-CIA agent who’s currently living in a mobile home in the New Mexico desert and scratching out what living he can make as a private eye. (Think of him as the opposite of television’s suave and successful Peter Gunn.) He’s just been hired by Ornella Neppi, a 30-something bail bondswoman whose business has been shaken by a cokehead, Emilio Gava, who’s anxious to flee and leave her on the hook for $125,000. Gunn agrees to help this woman, but with few clues and seeming no photographs of Gava available, he’s starting to wonder whether his quarry even exists. Littell takes such obvious delight in working the tropes and traditions of P.I. fiction, it’s hard not to enjoy the ride he offers in these pages.

READ MORE: “Ticking Time Bombs,” by Clayton Moore
(Kirkus Reviews).

The Once and Future Spy Novelist

Many years ago, and on the basis of a recommendation by one of my college journalism professors, I read a novel called The Defection of A.J. Lewinter. It turned out to be a spy thriller, the plot of which grew around the decision by an eccentric U.S. engineer, Augustus Lewinter, to switch sides, abscond to the Soviet Union with all of his knowledge about ballistic-missile nose-cone technology. This traitorous act incites a quite comical competition between intelligence agents representing the two Cold War rival countries, amid which the author illuminates deficiencies in both the democratic and socialist political models. Lewinter was pretty much my introduction to espionage fiction. It was also my introduction to novelist Robert Littell, a former Newsweek reporter who’d once been involved in the clandestine effort to make public the real story of Czechoslovakia’s 1968 invasion by the Soviet Union, and whose work has since been compared favorably with that of the rather better-known John le Carré (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Constant Gardener, etc.).

I mention all of this by way of pointing you to an intriguing, in-depth, and rare interview with Littell that was posted this morning in January Magazine, the books-oriented Webzine I have helped edit for many years now. Over the course of Littell’s exchange with British freelance journalist Ali Karim, the novelist recounts his memories of World War II and the Cold War, as well as his brushes with fame (including an unlikely encounter with actor Errol Flynn); suggests that a former CIA counterintelligence chief might in fact have been a Soviet agent; explains the inspirations for his latest pair of novels, The Company and Legends; and worries that George W. Bush, “for all his posturing,” doesn’t begin to understand the terrorist threats present in our modern world.

If you’re already familiar with Littell’s excellent work, you won’t want to miss this interview. And if you’ve never read any of his 14 novels, this is just the sort of introduction to get you interested. Read on.

(Photograph by Ali Karim)