creative writing from Georgia State University. He has been a Townsend Prize finalist, longlisted for the Southern Book Prize, and twice been a finalist for a Georgia Author of the Year award. He lives with his wife and two sons in Atlanta, where he is the English department chair at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School.Swann's new novel is Never Go Home.
At CrimeReads he tagged five favorite novels with deeply troubled protagonists, including:
Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith (1989)Read about the other entries on the list.
In the 1980s, the Soviets were clearly the bad guys, but Martin Cruz Smith flipped the script in Gorky Park (1981), introducing Moscow homicide investigator Arkady Renko. Born into the U.S.S.R.’s ruling class or nomenklatura, Arkady recognizes how false and corrupt Soviet society is. He lives in the shadow of bothhis parents; his father, a Red Army general, is bitterly disappointed in his son, and his mother committed suicide when he was a boy.
Gorky Park was a triumph, but the second Arkady Renko novel, Polar Star, is a masterpiece. Dismissed from his job and separated from Irina, the love of his life, Arkady now works on a factory ship in the Bering Sea. When a crewmate’s body is brought up in a catch net, the captain pulls Arkady off the ship’s “slime line” and orders him to investigate. Reluctantly, Arkady does, and uncovers far more than he bargained for, including smugglers, espionage, slippery Americans, and an antagonist from his own past. Dogged and ironic but never completely cynical, Arkady wrestles with what it means to be a policeman in a police state, and he feels himself coming back to life even as he places himself in further danger.
--Marshal Zeringue
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