It
began, Martin Cruz Smith explains in his soft, story-teller's voice, on
a quiet Saturday afternoon more than a decade ago. That was the day, he
recalls with a smile, when he, in a burst of paternal thoughtfulness, volunteered
to take his two teenage daughters shopping at a Laura Ashley not far from
the family's four-bedroom, hillside home in Mill Valley, a northern suburb
of San Francisco.
Slightly embarrassed, he ducks his head shyly and confesses that at first he suffered considerable discomfort. Perched awkwardly on one of the chairs the shop provides for the dubious convenience of fathers, husbands, and boyfriends, the author of "Gorky Park" and a string of other brooding thrillers wasn't sure what to do.
Left to his own devices while his daughters burrowed excitedly through the upscale merchandise, examining this, trying on that, rejecting one outfit, setting aside another for closer inspection, Smith began to chastise himself for not having the foresight to bring along a book with which he could occupy his time. In growing panic, he glanced hopefully around, desperately looking for something to read. Then he spotted a stack of magazines sitting on a nearby table.
Smith pauses, hungrily chomping on his tuna sandwich. A raucous group has commandeered the corner booth at the Buckeye Roadhouse, a cozy eatery along Highway 101 just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, and Smith has had to time his narrative to fit his words in between outbursts from the boisterous party.
"Most of them were about contemporary fashion," he continues, referring to the magazines. "But in the back of one was a story about the women who used to work in the British coal industry in the middle of the nineteenth century."
Mildly curious, he began to read. The women, he gleaned from the story, called themselves "pit girls" even though they worked above ground in the coal processing section and did not actually labor in the mines. What made them worthy of mention in a Laura Ashley publication, Smith tantalizingly points out, was not their occupation but their iconoclastic manner of dress.
Despite the hazy sunshine and vaunted temperateness of the Northern California climate, there is a blaze going in the fireplace at the high-ceilinged Buckeye, a relaxed, British-pub kind of place where Smith often goes to escape from his computer and ponder about plot, dialogue, and the vagaries of human nature.
The characters in his books -- the eight he has published under his own name and the three dozen others he has written pseudonymously over a 30-plus year career -- represent a broad spectrum of individuals ranging from a Hopi Indian mystic ("Nightwing") and an investigator for the Pope ("Gypsy in Amber" and "Canto for a Gypsy") to a tormented Russian homicide detective ("Gorky Park," "Polar Star" and "Red Square"). Almost uniformly, his protagonists tend to be enigmatic, sober, and introspective.
On the other hand, Smith is not at all like that. In contrast to the taciturn Youngman Duran, for instance, Smith is gregarious. And, unlike the seemingly humorless Arkady Renko, Smith is witty and buoyant, a man who clearly enjoys life and appreciates its whimsy.
A slightly built, lithe, physical-fitness enthusiast who keeps in trim by pounding out three or four miles a day up and down the coastal hills, the 5-9 scholar who enjoys digging into dusty library stacks as much as going to the movies with his 15-year-old son, Smith -- in contrast to his literary creations -- literally bubbles with good humor.
When he is amused, which is often, his eyes telegraph his delight; his chocolate-colored irises begin to shine like newly poured Swiss bonbons. Rhythmically, like a wave breaking on nearby Stinson Beach, the evidence of his emotion slides downward. His lips quiver, fluttering briefly, before erupting into a broad, bashful grin that shatters his tanned, freckled face into a hundred wrinkles. Then he starts to laugh, a steady, muted heh-heh-heh that comes from deep in his chest.
He is laughing now, explaining the impact the Laura Ashley magazine article made on his psyche.
Those pit girls were a stubborn lot, he explains. Because they worked around potentially dangerous machinery and could be maimed or severely injured if their clothing got caught in the wheels and gears, they ignored the contemporary societal commandment that demanded that all British women wear skirts and dresses. Instead, he chuckles, they opted for -- horror of horrors -- pants.
This took place, Smith emphasizes, in 1870s England, a period when the super-righteous, inordinately prudish Victorians were likely to accuse a woman of nakedness who only bared her arm, never mind one who dared to clothe herself in trousers. Despite tremendous pressure to change their sartorial predilections, the pit girls remained firm: They refused to give in. It was a daring, radical position to take, one that was not allowed to slip by unnoticed or unavenged by the rigid London bureaucracy.
The more he read, Smith smiles, the more jubilant he became; he was hopelessly hooked by the minicrisis the pit girls helped create. A law was rammed through Parliament designed to make them wear skirts, and their intransigence contributed to the building tension between rural residents and city dwellers in the early days of the industrial revolution.
"I was fascinated by their determination, their independence," he says earnestly. "I became captivated by these women. I was overwhelmed by a sense of inevitably; I knew I was going to have to tell their story."
However, it was not as simple as that. At the time, Smith had more work than he could handle, a not unhappy condition for someone who had seen more than his share of lean years.
A native of Reading, Pennsylvania, Smith's career had followed a strangely winding path since he graduated from Penn in 1964.
After college, he worked briefly as a sportswriter at a small Pennsylvania newspaper, but soon decided that what he really wanted was to see Europe. But there was a roadblock. Since his journalism job paid so little, he needed to find more ruminative work if he hoped to be able to pay his way abroad. So he became a Good Humor man, hustling ice cream from a truck in the black neighborhoods of Camden, New Jersey. In a matter of months -- a testament to his abilities as a salesman -- Smith had accumulated enough to pay his fare to Spain.
However, the dream proved short-lived. Six months later, broke and unable to find a job paying enough to allow him to eat, Smith returned to Pennsylvania and went to work for the Associated Press in the news agency's Harrisburg bureau.
Feeling stifled by the wireservice requirement to stick solely to the facts ("I always had imagination," Smith says, "even in college when I didn't know the answer to an essay question I could always write in-depth about what I made up"), he left after five months and went to work for the Daily News in Philadelphia.
That job lasted only three months, then Smith was off to New York where he became managing editor of a small magazine called "For Men Only."
The job paid so poorly Smith had to adopt special tactics to survive. One was the winked-upon practice of buying stories for the magazine that he himself had written under various pseudonyms, collecting the fees to augment his meager salary.
The magazine job lasted a little longer than the others, slightly more than two years. It ended abruptly after the publisher hired a consultant that Smith did not get along with. "I told the publisher it was either him or me," Smith says with a twinkle. The next day Smith was gone.
By then, he had married his college sweetheart, Emily Arnold, and the two decided to give Europe another try. Concentrating this time on southern Portugal, the experiment lasted only six months. Again, the money ran out and they returned to New York.
Once he got back, Smith looked up an old friend from his magazine days who was then working at a publishing house. The man told Smith if he would write a book, he would buy it. A year later, in 1970, Smith published his first novel, a paperback entitled "The Indians Won."
Despite the fact that he was a published book author, Smith continued to struggle to pay his bills. Over the next few years he wrote some three dozen books, none of them under his own name. They included several "Jake Logan" Westerns, a string of "Nick Carter" mysteries, and two movie novelizations.
It was several more years before Smith made any serious money. That was after he wrote "Gypsy in Amber," a novel about a gypsy detective named Roman Grey. It sold to a mystery book club and was made into a tv movie, which brought in some welcome cash. It also resulted in a sequel, "Canto for a Gypsy."
His first three books had the name "Martin Smith" on the covers, ignoring his middle name, William -- three very Anglo names reflecting his father's Scots, Irish, and English ancestry. But soon after they were published Smith decided to declare his cultural diversity, adopting as his middle name "Cruz," the first name of his maternal grandmother, a pueblo Indian from New Mexico.
Riding the modest success of his gypsy books, Smith's next novel ("Nightwing," carrying the signature Martin Cruz Smith), was a thriller about the Indians in Arizona and its main character was a Hopi named Youngman Duran. A spooky tale featuring vampire bats, plague, and mysticism, it was right for the time, bringing in -- to Smith -- an unimaginable $500,000 in book and movie money.
In 1972, five years before "Nightwing" was published, Smith had begun work on what would be his most famous novel, a grisly tale of serial murder in Moscow entitled "Gorky Park." However, its route to publication was long and torturous; before it finally showed up in bookstores in 1981 Smith's mettle would be severely tested, his resolve rigorously tried.
The idea for "Gorky Park" came to Smith via a book he had found on the remainder's rack in a store in Greenwich Village. It was a non-fiction tome about a Russian forensic scientist who specialized in recreating faces from the skulls of unidentified skeletons.
Initially, Smith planned to make his protagonist an American detective who travelled to Moscow to help the local police solve a series of brutal murders. And that is the way he sold the idea to Putnam's (the "Nightwing" bonanza was still far in the future) for an advance of $15,000.
Smith's problem was he knew little about the Soviets or life behind the Iron Curtain. Since he was allowed into the country for only two weeks on a tourist visa, he had to rely on other sources.
To fill the knowledge gap, Smith turned to the New York libraries and a small group of recent émigrés from the Soviet Union he contacted through Radio Liberty, a Russian-language radio station based in New York.
"I spent hundreds of hours with those people, one of whom was a lawyer who was familiar with the Russian criminal justice system," Smith says, probing their memories and experiences for the myriad of details he would need to know about life in the USSR.
Soon, a curious situation developed. The deeper Smith got into the book, the more the American slipped into the background. Taking his place as the tale's main character was a Russian detective he called Arkady Renko. This plot change created a major problem for Smith.
While he had been hesitant at first about making Renko a communist, fearful that the American public, by then hardened by years of antagonism toward the Soviet Union thanks to the Cold War, might not accept a party member hero, he soon changed his mind. His émigré friends convinced him that Renko would have had to be a party member to have held the position he did within the homicide division of the Moscow police.
In the end, Smith compromised somewhat by making Renko a non-political communist. "At some point I decided that I had to drop my invaluable moral baggage, that I had to distinguish between what is moral and what is real."
However, his editor at Putnam's did not see things as clearly; the house refused to publish the book with a communist protagonist.
Smith countered by offering to buy back the rights, but Putnam refused to deal. For more than five years, the two fought over the issue before Putnam's finally agreed to Smith's proposal. Smith then took his manuscript to Random House, which eagerly snapped it up, paying him $1 million, precisely $985,000 more than Putnam's had originally given him.
The next shocker for Smith, was that his story about Renko did not end with the Moscow book. "At the time," Smith says, shaking his head, "I had no intention of writing another novel about the detective."
Then he read a newspaper clipping about the Soviet fishing fleet that gave him an idea for a Renko sequel. After all, Smith rationalized, he had a lot of material on the Soviets left over and Renko was a convenient character. "I knew him so well he was easy to write about. He was like a piano that was asking me to play another tune."
On impulse, Smith jumped aboard a jet and flew to meet the Soviet fishing fleet at its first Western port. Talking his way aboard the pilot boat that went to meet the Soviet factory ship, the fleet's primary vessel, Smith introduced himself to the captain and wrangled an invitation aboard.
It was, nevertheless, a strange situation. Although relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were beginning to warm, Smith was slightly surprised to discover that he had become a pariah to the communist hierarchy because of "Gorky Park," a book the Kremlinites apparently found slightly less than sympathetic to their cause.
"I was the enemy," Smith says. "'Gorky Park' was banned in the Soviet Union and there was a directive in the handbook that the government gave to citizens travelling abroad to avoid the book." It had not helped that Smith's novel after "Gorky Park," "Stallion Gate" had dealt with Soviet spies within the U.S. atomic bomb project.
The captain of the Soviet factory ship, well aware of who Smith was, at first was hostile to the writer's attempts to find out more about the ship and the fleet. But, applying the sales tactics he had learned as Good Humor man in Camden, Smith persuaded the captain that he was an objective writer and was not anti-Soviet.
Much to Smith's surprise, his patter proved effective. "I think I convinced him because he invited me aboard the ship. Then he didn't want me to leave. But by inviting me, he took a real risk. To be what he was, he had to be a party member. After my visit to his ship, there was a KGB investigation and the captain almost lost his command." Despite that, the men became friends. Later, after travel between the countries became possible, the Soviet fishing ship commander visited Smith in California. By then, Smith was well into his third Renko novel, "Red Square."
Smith gently stirs his cappuchino, staring reflectively into the near distance. In actuality, he concedes, the Renko trilogy had been good preparation for writing "Rose," the title of his novel about the pit girls and Victorian England which will be released by Random House in May.
As with "Gorky Park," "Rose" underwent a major plot change early in its evolution. At the beginning, Smith planned to make the novel's protagonist a pit girl. But the more he thought about it, the more he came to realize that was not a good idea. So again he switched directions, making his main character a man, specifically a half-American, half-British mining engineer who becomes involved in the coal-mining subculture after being fired from his previous job because of a minor scandal. Out of work and in disgrace, he is hired by a churchman who wants him to try to find his daughter's fiance, a young man who inexplicably disappeared from the upcountry town of Wigan, a real place in the heart of the British coal country.
To add verisimilitude to his descriptions of life in Wigan and the mines, Smith dug up songs that were popular at the time ("Daddy, Don't Go Down into the Pit Tonight" was a favorite), and searched out obscure poems relating to the British coal mining industry. He even had a source send him swatches of material that were used in the clothes of the period so Smith could better describe the color and texture.
Along the way, he became an avid student of language, the better to write reliably about the northern English accent and the slang used by his characters.
He also became something of an expert on the devastating effects of mine accidents. By combing through transcripts of coroner's inquests, Smith learned, for instance, that when methane gas explodes it produces carbon monoxide, and two or three breaths of that is sufficient to render a man unconscious. "If rescuers don't come quickly, it is too late," Smith explains.
To tell the story as accurately as possible, Smith had to learn not only about mining, which at the time was one of the country's major industries, but also about contemporary politics and the friction that existed between the rough and tumble miners and the effete Londoners.
At one stage, members of Parliament, apparently fearing that the coal miner's union was becoming much too powerful, tried to curb the group's effectiveness by mandating that coal be imported rather than produced domestically, hoping that by killing the industry they could kill the union. This and other controls attempted by the establishment led to a long series of hate-filled confrontations that resulted in injuries and deaths on both sides.
"Violence was very much a way of life for the miners," says Smith. "Even their sports were violent." A world away from genteel London, many miles to the south, the most popular diversion in the coal mining country was a barbarous form of boxing in which opponents wearing heavy clogs embossed with brass studs tried to kick each other to death.
The deeper his research went, Smith says, the more mesmerized he became with the period and the people, especially the pit girls. "They were marvelous women, so popular among a large segment of the population that their photographs were reproduced on cardboard strips, which were circulated much as baseball cards would be distributed in the United States almost a hundred years later."
The story of the pit girls is what drew Smith to the subject to begin with and it is their lives that form the background for "Rose." However, says Smith, the novel exists on several levels. On one, it is a tale about the mines and the people who worked them. On another, it explores the British mining industry, period politics, and the monumental differences that existed between the peoples in the north and south of England during the Victorian period.
To make it more attractive to the reader, Smith has wrapped it all around a mystery. "That's a convenient device that allows me to present several points of view," Smith explains. "The existence of a crime allows the protagonist access to all levels. The usual laws of society are suspended; he can go to people of all walks of life and get them to talk because he is an investigator."
Only momentarily, Smith says, did he question the wisdom of his decision to write the book. That was when, in a strange reverse echo of his experience with his original "Gorky Park" publisher, he also ran into an unexpected problem with the British house scheduled to print the new novel.
However, unlike the New York publisher who refused to handle "Gorky Park" without an American hero, Smith's British publisher turned thumbs down on "Rose" precisely because of the American connection. "They weren't convinced that I could do it," Smith says with a tight smile. "They didn't think that an American novelist could write authoritatively about British history."
Smith pushes his coffee cup to the center of the table and leans against the booth's high, cushioned back. Lazily stretching his legs, he drops his chin and cocks his head to the side. His eyes begin to glimmer. His lips shiver, then spread into an immense grin. "But that was easy to fix," he laughs. "I just found another publisher."