The actual Polar Star is a vast, battered factory ship of the Soviet Far Eastern Fleet, ploughing its way from Siberia to Alaska, pro-cessing fish caught by four attendant American trawlers.
It’s another magnificent stand-alone thriller. As in Gorky Park the central actor is Arkady Renko, a former Moscow police inspector, a good man in a difficult place. He brilliantly evokes the power and terror of the sea and the way it shapes the character of those who work in peril on it. But his second book, in addition to being very funny, contains writing almost worthy of Conrad himself. That was, of course, Cruz Smith’s first, bestselling novel. ‘Why not Gorky Park?’ fellow players often ask me. For myself, the American author Martin Cruz Smith has never moved out of the top five, and his superlative Polar Star (1989), a story of murder and espionage on a Soviet fish-processing ship in the Bering Sea, is the book I most revisit. In our version we argue as to who are the top five thriller writers, then brood over which is their best book. Those of us who prize a good literary thriller well above the price of rubies play a game resembling Fantasy Football.
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