The Crime Scene: Russian Front

Stuart Kaminsky was not named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America because of a single book or even a single series character. He was deservedly given the organization’s highest honor for maintaining a consistently high level of professional crime fiction throughout a career that has spanned more than three decades.After a gap of seven years, Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov is back in his 15th book, “People Who Walk in Darkness” (Forge, 287 pages, $23.95), and it is a good entry in this series, one of which, “A Cold Red Sunrise,” won the Edgar as the best novel of 1988.Authors become popular or critically acclaimed (occasionally both) for a variety of reasons. Their success sometimes involves intensely challenging plots (Agatha Christie, for example, and Ellery Queen), and sometimes the attraction is prose of lyrical perfection, as with James Crumley and early John le Carré. Still others rely on characters so original and beloved that readers cannot help but want to know what they’re up to now, as with Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Robert Parker’s Spenser, while other writers produce novels of unrelenting action, with a breathtaking pace that forces readers to keep turning pages, as with Dick Francis and Lee Child.Although Mr. Kaminsky would not rank with the very greatest practitioners in any of these areas, he is one of the few who brings solid achievement in all of them.Among his series characters is Toby Peters, a down-and-out private eye in the Golden Age of Hollywood (the 1930s and ’40s), who is so desperate for money that he accepts dubious and nearly impossible cases for such illustrious clients as Errol Flynn, Howard Hughes, the Marx Brothers, Judy Garland, Gary Cooper, and Mae West. He shares an office with an eccentric dentist, Sheldon Minck, and finds reasons to stay in contact with his ex-wife. The charm and humor of these zany adventures have persisted through 24 novels.Abe Lieberman, a longtime Chicago cop, has been featured in 10 books, and there have been five more novels about a Florida-based process-server, Lew Fonesca, as well as a short-lived series about Jim Rockford and the CSI detectives. None of these quite attain the depth of the Rostnikov novels, however, which force readers to become caught up in the difficulties facing this honest and good-hearted Moscow cop whose priorities involve his family and doing his job while staying out of serious trouble under a notoriously repressive government.In “People Who Walk in Darkness,” Rostnikov is assigned to solve the possible murder of a Canadian geologist in a Siberian diamond mine haunted by the ghost of a young girl who died there. There is reason to believe that the murder is related to the torture and killing of two black South Africans, and Rostnikov is given nine days to bring the case to a successful conclusion, or else his department is scheduled to be absorbed into the Division of Murder by its ambitious and corrupt director.When a prostitute on a train from Kiev to Moscow is stabbed to death and connected to the other murders, the case becomes even more complicated.Rostnikov (whose first name, Porfiry, is a tribute to the policeman in “Crime and Punishment” who draws a confession from the murderer Raskolnikov), even after 15 books, is not as richly limned as Arkady Renko, the Russian policeman created by Martin Cruz Smith with whom he is invariably compared. This may not be a total surprise, as there is little introspection or internal conflict on the part of Mr. Kaminsky’s characters, a key element that prevents them from being in the first rank of literary creations.It should be noted that this is just fine with the author, who has made it clear, as he once wrote in an autobiographical essay, that his goal is to be “a storyteller who transports his reader into the tale.” And, “if there is Meaning in my tales … then let it be absorbed rather than academized.”The prose in this novel, as is true of the more than 60 books Mr. Kaminsky has produced so faithfully over the years, is unlikely to draw rapturous comparisons to Wordsworth or Keats, but his ability to produce sentences, paragraphs, and chapters of absolute clarity and simplicity is commonly undervalued.Let me try it. I like Stuart Kaminsky’s new book. I think you will, too.Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual Best American Mystery Stories. He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.

The Crime Scene: Russian Front

The Crime Scene: Russian Front

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