Girl from Venice (Smith)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 3, 1942
• Where—Reading, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania
• Awards—Gold Dagger Award; Dashiell Hammet Award (twice)
• Currently—lives in San Rafael, California


Martin Cruz Smith is an American mystery novelist. He is best known for his eight-novel series on Russian investigator Arkady Renko, who was first introduced in 1981 with Gorky Park.

He originally wrote under the name "Martin Smith," only to discover other writers of the same name. He now inserts Cruz into his name, his paternal grandmother's surname.

Early life and education
Martin William Smith was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, to John Calhoun Smith and Louise Lopez, both jazz muscians. His mother is amerindian—from Pueblo descent—making Smith partly of Pueblo, Spanish, Senecu del Sur, and Yaqui ancestry. His mother has also been an activist in the Amerindian rights movement.

Smith was educated at Germantown Academy, in Germantown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, then at the University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing in 1964.

Career
From 1965 to 1969, Smith worked as a journalist and began writing fiction in the early 1970s.

Canto for a Gypsy (1972), his third novel overall and the second to feature Roman Grey, a gypsy art dealer in New York City, was nominated for an Edgar Award.

Nightwing (1977), also an Edgar nominee, was his breakthrough novel, and he adapted it for a feature film of the same name (1979).

Smith is best known for his novels featuring Russian investigator Arkady Renko, whom Smith introduced in Gorky Park (1981). That novel, which was called the "first thriller of the '80s" by Time, became a bestseller and won a Gold Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers' Association. Taken together, Renko has since appeared in eight novels by Smith. Two books of the Arkady series occupied the nos. 1 and 2 spots for several months at a time: Gorky Park and Polar Star (1989).

During the 1990s, Smith twice won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers. The first time was for Rose in 1996; the second time was for Havana Bay in 1999. And in 2010, he and Arkady Renko returned to the top of the New York Times bestseller list when Three Stations debuted at No. 7 on the fiction bestsellers list.

Other books/series
Earlier, in the 1970s, Smith wrote under the pen name Jake Logan, publishing two Slocum adult action Western novels. Under his own name, Smith has also written the Inquisitor series, focusing on a James Bond-type agent employed by the Vatican. He also wrote two novels in the Nick Carter series.

Personal life
Smith lives in San Rafael, California, with his family. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/17/2016.)