Arkady Renko

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Arkady Renko is a fictional detective who is the central character of six novels by the American writer Martin Cruz Smith. He is cynical, distrusting, and most definitely and defiantly Ukrainian.

In Gorky Park, the first novel, he is a chief investigator for the Soviet Militsiya in Moscow, where he is in charge of homicide investigations. In the sequels, he takes on roles varying from militiaman to worker on a fish processing ship in the arctic.

Born into the nomenklatura, his father (an important military man) sees Arkady as a bitter failure for choosing the simple life of a policeman over a military career in the Red Army, or even a career in the Communist Party; he was also never able to forgive Arkady for indirectly and unwittingly helping his mother commit suicide (he helped her gather the rocks she used to drown herself with in the lake at their family estate when he was a young boy). Wary of the official lies of Soviet society, Arkady exposes corruption and dishonesty on the part of influential and well-protected members of the elite, regardless of the consequences. When exposed to Western capitalist society, he finds it to be equally corrupt and returns to the Soviet Union. Despite this, and his own tough nature, he emerges as a man capable of displaying both compassion and a faith in the future.

The first three books published between 1981 and 1992 form a trilogy culminating in the fall of the Soviet Union, at the August Coup in 1991. The action of the first book takes place in the Soviet Union itself, the second on board a Soviet fishing vessel in the Bering Sea, and the third in almost-post-Soviet Russia and Germany. The fourth and fifth books, which appeared between 1999 and 2004, are set in Cuba and post-Soviet Ukraine (respectively). The latest book in the series, published in 2007, returns Arkady to a Russia now presided over by Vladimir Putin.