A Cold Red Sunrise
by Stuart M. Kaminsky
Summary
In the Siberian settlement of Tumsk, population a few dozen souls and one weather station, a government commissar named Rutkin is murdered on the ice, an icicle driven through his eye, while investigating the death of a dissident's small daughter. Moscow's response defines the book's Soviet chess: send Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, the capital's best and least promotable homicide man, with orders precise as a scalpel, solve the commissar's murder, and do not touch the matter he was investigating.
Rostnikov is one of crime fiction's great creations: a squat Moscow policeman with a war ruined leg, a passion for competitive weightlifting and smuggled Ed McBain paperbacks, a Jewish wife whose existence caps his career, and a lifetime's mastery of the only art that matters in his system, solving crimes without letting the state notice what else he has understood. In Tumsk, with his cadaverous deputy Karpo, he works the village's tiny cast, the exiled dissident, the naturalist, the priest of the old beliefs, the officials counting days back to civilisation, against cold rendered so physically the book should be shelved with survival literature. The two cases are, of course, one, exactly as forbidden, and Rostnikov's solution is engineered, characteristically, in layers: one truth for Moscow, one for justice, one for himself, the moral arithmetic of a decent man inside an indecent machine.
Around two hundred and thirty pages, tight and wintry.
Best for readers who want the Soviet procedural at its most humane, Ed McBain's form smuggled through customs and put to work under the permafrost.
Historical Context & Significance
A Cold Red Sunrise won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1989, the fifth Rostnikov novel and the series' international breakthrough, arriving with perfect glasnost timing: an American's Soviet policeman honoured in the season the Soviet system was opening enough to be examined, and the book's picture of institutional double think read as reportage.
Stuart Kaminsky was the genre's great professor pluralist, a Northwestern film scholar who ran four series at once, the Toby Peters Hollywood confections, the Abe Lieberman Chicago novels, the Lew Fonesca books, and this, the serious shelf, publishing at a clip that eventually passed sixty books alongside the film biographies; the Grand Master title arrived in 2006, three years before his death.
Rostnikov's debts to McBain were paid openly, the 87th Precinct volumes appearing inside the novels as contraband, and Kaminsky remained a lifelong student of the American procedural; the series stands with Martin Cruz Smith's Renko books among the notable fictional police work the Cold War produced from inside the Soviet system.