The History of Mystery

#4: Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith.  Arkady Renko, investigating the home of a dead man, receives a message on the computer printer with a seemingly obvious question: "Where is Red Square?"  One imagines that to a Russian this is like asking Who is buried in Grant's Tomb, but it turns out to be all too complicated...

The main element that makes Red Square great is Arkady Renko and the usual fiendish Martin Cruz Smith plotting.  That's what makes Martin Cruz Smith's best mystery a worthy entry in the Top 4, but what makes Red Square his best mystery?  We've already encounterd Polar Star deeper in the list, and some would vote for Gorky Park.  Havana Bay was also stellar, and Wolves Eat Dogs only slightly less so.  Even the lesser Arkady Renko mysteries are better than most author's best, though I really really wanted Tatiana to involve finding the Amber Room.  Also, apologies to the master writer, but watching someone break a code is always boring.  But Martin Cruz Smith shouldnt feel bad - Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle also stumbled on that Waterloo - and if they couldnt make cryptography exciting, who could?

Red Square is the top MCS mystery for me because it bent one of the conventions of mysteries.  We readers are accustomed, when we read a mystery, to willingly enter an author's world and accept its fascinating but bizarre rules.  Your powers of observation will be tested, and the author may try to rush an important fact past you as a seemingly trivial detail.  But rarely are you expected to bring in real world knowledge to keep up with the fictional detective.  But the central mystery of Red Square turns out to be something that really happened - well concealed, but something that I and many readers will have had a perfectly fair chance to guess and apply to the puzzling facts facing Arkady.  And if you read it and you've never heard of the historical events at work, you've just had a painless and exciting history lesson...