Murder At Sea

By Paul Gray

POLAR STAR

by Martin Cruz Smith

Random House; 386 pages; $19.95

In Gorky Park (1981), Martin Cruz Smith showed a good way to turn one among the thousands of detective novels published annually into a runaway best seller. The three crucial steps: 1) construct a plot with plenty of corpses and exfoliating complexities; 2) provide a beleaguered and therefore sympathetic hero, one whose problem involves not only solving a crime but avoiding extermination by a small army of people who do not wish the truth to be known; 3) set the action in a place that is inaccessible and romantically forbidding -- in the case of Gorky Park, Moscow and environs.

These days, the Soviet Union and its capital evoke less mystery and fewer perturbations than they did eight years ago. Gorbachev and glasnost have helped see to that. But Smith's formula for success ought to remain valid if a suitable substitution can be found for step 3. In Polar Star, Smith finds it. One dead body leads to others, along an arc of increasing menace and violence. Arkady Renko, the intrepid police investigator of Gorky Park, reappears, again called to rescue a situation that shadowy, powerful forces may not want to be saved.

Only the venue has changed. Instead of Moscow, Renko must navigate the intricacies of the Polar Star, a huge Soviet factory ship plying the waters of the Bering Sea. Its mission is both prosaic and delicate. It must gather and process 50,000 tons of seafood to contribute to the nourishing of the Soviet people. But its suppliers, who do the actual fishing in exchange for cash, are American trawlers.

This joint commercial venture between historic enemies takes place in one of the earth's chillier, less hospitable locales. And when a huge net full of an incoming catch drops the body of Zina Patiashvili onto the deck of the Polar Star, the whole enterprise becomes icier still. Patiashvili had been a popular member of the Polar Star work force, dishing up food in the mess and making herself available to a goodly number of male comrades on board and, so rumor has it, to more than a few visiting American fishermen.

Her lifeless reappearance raises a number of troubling questions. Murder? Bad. Suicide? Much better. In the good old days, the inconvenient matter could have been put on ice until the ship returned to its home port of Vladivostok, where the official party whitewash would have explained everything. Not now. The ship's captain understands the new realities: "The problem is the Americans. They will watch to see whether we conduct an open and forthright investigation."

That calls for Arkady Renko, who happens, by chance and Smith's ingenuity, to be a lowly worker on the ship's "slime line," hacking up fish and hunkering down from further recriminations for his dogged sleuthing in Gorky Park. Convinced that his investigating days are over, Renko neither seeks nor wants this assignment, which threatens his anonymity and possibly his safety. Significant people on the ship would also like to see him remain hidden and humbled. One of his enemies-to-be reminds him of his expulsion from the only group that truly matters in the Soviet Union. Renko replies, "Membership in the Party was too great an honor. I could not bear it."

/ Renko's laconic sense of the ridiculous endeared him to millions of Western readers during his last adventure and will no doubt do so again. "In irony," he remarks about his homeland, "we lead the world." There is, it must be added, something incongruous in a character who so diligently labors for a political system that tries to crush him. When one character asks why he so stubbornly pursues the facts, Renko replies, "That's a mystery to us all." And hardly the only one in this action-heavy novel. If anything, the plot of Polar Star can seem, to the jaundiced eye, a trifle rigged, with shocks occurring at metronomic intervals. Such objections, though, are likely to crop up only when the novel has been finished and set aside. In the full rush of the chase, Smith and Renko still seem irresistible.