Volume 28, Number 10 · June 11, 1981
Thrillernik
By Julian Symons
Gorky Park
by Martin Cruz Smith
Random House, 365 pp., $13.95
If, as Auden suggested, the ideal detective-story reader desires an unchanging fictional world in which the same problem is endlessly repeated with minor variations, the ideal reader of a thriller demands almost the opposite, a fix of continuous novelty. The agent becomes over the years double, triple, multiple; he is numbered 007 and licensed to kill. History is invoked and turned on its head as Churchill meets Hitler secretly in Len Deighton. A whole mythology of agency terms is invented to add verisimilitude to John le Carré's spy 'Circus.' Novelty is provided in Gorky Park by offering a Russian criminal investigator as hero, and Moscow as principal setting. A not very helpful map of the city is used as a frontispiece.
Review, 1387 words
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