About the Book

On the eve of a show trial, a Soviet dissident is stabbed through the heart.

On a frigid night in silent Moscow, Aleksander Granovsky paces the floor of his government flat. He has dedicated his life to exposing the brutality of the Russian penal system, and in two days he will be tried for the crime of smuggling essays to the West. Granovsky is drafting a speech to deliver in court when an assassin appears and pierces his heart with the point of a rusty sickle.

The case falls in the lap of Porfiry Rostnikov, a Moscow police inspector whose three decades on the force have made him an expert in navigating the labyrinths of the Soviet bureaucracy. But it will take every ounce of Rostnikov’s skill to find the killer and survive the investigation, as every question he asks takes him closer to the heart of the KGB.

About the Author

Stuart M. Kaminsky (1934-2009) was one of the most prolific crime fiction authors of the last four decades. Born in Chicago, he spent his youth immersed in pulp fiction and classic cinema - two forms of popular entertainment which he would make his life’s work. After college and a stint in the army, Kaminsky wrote film criticism and biographies of the great actors and directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. In 1977, when a planned biography of Charlton Heston fell through, Kaminsky wrote Bullet for a Star, his first Toby Peters novel, beginning a fiction career that would last the rest of his life.

Kaminsky penned twenty-four novels starring the detective, whom he described as “the anti-Philip Marlowe.” In 1981’s Death of a Dissident, Kaminsky debuted Moscow police detective Porfiry Rostnikov, whose stories were praised for their accurate depiction of Soviet life. His other two series starred Abe Lieberman, a hardened Chicago cop, and Lew Fonseca, a process server. In all, Kaminsky wrote more than sixty novels. He died in St. Louis in 2009.

Death of a Dissident

An Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov Mystery

Stuart M. Kaminsky

BASTEI ENTERTAINMENT

Bastei Entertainment is an imprint of Bastei Lübbe AG

Copyright © 2015 by Bastei Lübbe AG, Schanzenstraße 6-20, 51063 Cologne, Germany

For the original edition:

Copyright © 2012 by The Mysterious Press, LLC, 58 Warren Street, New York, NY. U.S.A.

Introduction copyright © 1991 by Stuart M. Kaminsky

Copyright © 1981 by Stuart M. Kaminsky

Project management: Lori Herber

Cover adaptation: Christin Wilhelm, www.grafic4u.de

Cover design by Taylor Cloonan

E-book production: Jouve Germany GmbH & Co. KG

ISBN 978-3-95859-316-9

www.bastei-entertainment.com

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this e-book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Introduction

THE PORFIRY PETROVICH ROSTNIKOV SERIES may never have been started had it not been for the constant rejection by publishers of a pet project of mine.

For years I nurtured the idea that within me was a vast, long multi-generational novel based very loosely on my own family and its history. I outlined the novel, did the research, wrote over 100 pages and sent it to my agent, who tried without success to interest a publisher.

Since the first two chapters of the rejected tome took place in the Soviet Union, I decided to use some of what I knew and had already done, pour in some things I loved and write a mystery novel. I knew a great deal about Russia and about my family. All of my grandparents were born in Russia and I had many a remembered tale to draw upon. I love Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, as, you will discover, does Porfiry Petrovich. I also love Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels, and John Creasy’s Gideon novels were favorites of mine in high school. Above all, I love “classical” Russian literature, particularly Dostoevsky and, even more specifically, Crime and Punishment.

There was no grand plan to combine all of the above when I outlined and then wrote Death of a Dissident. I knew they would come together, not by calculation but because they were a part of me.

What surprised me a bit when I did begin to write was the realization that I had adopted the style of the Russian novels I had read and I liked what I was doing. It came naturally—like affecting an accent without realizing it. I was writing about Russians, so I wrote in the style that I remembered as Russian. I still write the Rostnikov tales in this style, which goes against the grain of much contemporary Soviet fiction which, in turn, strives to have its own modernist identity and to get away from the very style with which I feel comfortable.

I also found that, from book to book depending on the tales told, I adopted the style of whatever specific Russian author most suited that tale. This led to a discovery. As much as I admire Dostoevsky and Chekov, I am clearly, at least in my own mind, most influenced by Gogol, who may be the least appreciated of the Russians.

So, I had written what I thought was a Russian police procedural tale influenced by such diverse sources as McBain, Simenon, Creasy, Dostoevsky and Gogol. I liked what I had done. My agent liked what I had done. However, no hardcover publisher liked what had been done so the book came out as a paperback original.

Death of a Dissident was submitted to the publisher and accepted almost a year before it was published. Death of a Dissident suffered the fate of most paperback originals: no reviews. It also happened that Gorky Park was published a little over a month before Death of a Dissident. Though I had enjoyed Martin Cruz Smith’s novels—and still do—I couldn’t read Gorky Park. The reviews made it clear that our books bore only a superficial resemblance to each other.

Since I thought the series was ending, as much as I liked it, I decided to kill off a major character. In the first of several drafts of Black Knight in Red Square, Emil Karpo is killed. My editor and agent liked the character so much that they persuaded me to let him live. There’s an interesting parallel here with the 87th Precinct series. At the beginning of the series, Ed McBain tried to kill Steve Carella, his central character.

My next brilliant idea was to let Rostnikov get out of the Soviet Union, have him move to Chicago where he would become an avuncular problem solver for the Soviet community. It wasn’t that I thought it was a great idea. The fact is that it is damned hard to write about characters living in a city I’ve never seen and about which I must do an enormous amount of research with each book. Ed McBain tried to deal with this problem by having his tales take place in the non-existent (but really New York) city of Isola. He discovered, as the series went on, that it was more difficult to do this than to do the research on a real city. Each time you create a detail, give a description, in your mythical city, you’ve got to remember it, make it part of the whole that you must repeatedly bring to life.

In my case, once again, agent and publisher persuaded me.

Black Knight in Red Square was nominated for an Edgar as Best Paperback Original and had a new life.

I am now not only comfortable with my characters and comfortable writing about the Soviet Union; I’m sure I’d continue writing the novels even if I had no publisher. I simply want to know how they are doing, what they are doing, and what is going to happen to them. I guess I’m a fan of my own series.

What do I like most about these books? The three central characters who have their roots in literature and my imagination.

Rostnikov himself bears more than a passing resemblance to Jules Maigret. His methods are similar, but his milieu is much different. Rostnikov is, like George Gideon, a man of action. And it is no coincidence that Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov bears the name of the magistrate who drives Raskolnikov to a confession of murder. Rostnikov, finally is my fantasy of my Russian grandfather, my father’s father, who died when I was about six.

Actually, I had two Russian grandfathers. My mother’s father was a model for the old man who is murdered in his bathtub at the beginning of Red Chameleon. Rostnikov, like my idealized grandfather, is loving, determined, whimsical, loyal, romantic and pragmatic. He is a man who loves his job, his wife, his son, his country, his co-workers. He is a man filled with contradictions who often takes chances, challenges the system because the challenge keeps him alive and gives his life meaning. He is a man with a sense of humor that is peculiar to a Russian.

Emil Karpo, in contrast, is a tall, gaunt, loyal, humorless traditionalist who bears some resemblance to Mr. (not Dr.) Spock. Karpo is a haunted man who had devoted his life and loyalty to the religion of Communism which, as practiced in the Soviet Union, keeps letting him down. Karpo wished to deny his emotions, the needs of his body and the human loyalties which, ultimately, are more immediate than his devotion to duty.

Sasha Tkach is, in some ways, what Burt Kling might have become in the 87th Precinct novels, had life not dealt him a monstrous love life and had he been plunked down in contemporary Russia rather than in Isola. Sasha’s concerns are domestic. Life, the complications of a changing Russia, a growing family, and his inability to cope with women threaten to overwhelm him.

I guess, at one level, Rostnikov lives for the present. Karpo lives for the past and Tkach lives for the future in both the dream and reality that was and is the Russia about which I write.

Stuart M. Kaminsky

“And what if I am wrong,” he cried suddenly after a moment’s thought. “What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind—then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it’s all as it should be.”

Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Chapter 1

MOSCOW WINTERS ARE REALLY NO worse nor much longer than the winters of Chicago or New York. If they seem so, it is because Muscovites like to think of their winters as particularly furious. It has become a matter of pride, an expression of unnecessary stoicism somewhat peculiar to the Russian psyche.

In truth, when the snow falls for three or four days and the temperature drops to thirteen degrees, the huge plows radiate down the wide streets from Red Square, clearing the way for the well-bundled pedestrians, who show no particular discomfort as they flow around the machines and past the dvornikthe teams of husbands and wives with brooms who sweep the smaller streets and sidewalks. Two hundred feet below the ground and the snow, millions of Muscovites travel in the warmth of the Metro to their jobs or to stores to wait in line for a dozen eggs or a pair of Czech shoes that look like those in American movies. At night, the same people and the more than half a million students in the city travel quietly home.

It is the silence of winter in Moscow that most strikes a foreigner. The crowds of the day and evening are enormous, but they hum rather than shout. If one passes the Aleksander Garden at the foot of the Kremlin, however, one might hear the laughing voices of children, who have been skating through the day.

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!