British novelist Tom Rob Smith plays CSI: Moscow in his new detective novel

The Secret Speech
By Tom Rob Smith
Grand Central Publishing, May 2009
Hardcover; 416 pages; $24.99

I rather dislike panning books, though I do it more often than I should. So few people read these days, and why turn readers away from a book that may very well surpass the estimation of some peevish critic? After all, literary criticism is an infamously inexact profession: we ridiculed Melville and took a Pulitzer away from Pynchon.

But once in a while, the critic acts like a trusty navigator, steering his following – however small – away from potential disaster. The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith is one such pratfall, and I would be remiss not to sound an alarm about its maelstrom of slapped-together sentences and absurd plot developments.

As fictionalized history of the years directly after Stalin’s death, it is simplistic at best, with characters endlessly referring to “the State” in silly, and ineffective, echoes of Orwell. The true mystery in these pages, however, is the fate of Smith’s apparently absent editor, who – at least one hopes - would have objected to a character immersing himself in “a basin of warm, soapy respectability,” among countless other brutalities visited upon the English language.

The plot is a proud product of the Dan Brown school of writing, full of improbable turns complemented by a neglect of historical detail that makes The Da Vinci Code look like official Church history. The protagonist, Leo Demidov, was the hero of Child 44, Smith’s debut novel, in which the State Security agent nabbed a notorious child killer through unorthodox means. He is rewarded with his own homicide department, but when contraband copies of Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” – in which he denounced Stalin in front of the 20th Party Congress - begin to turn up around Moscow, causing panic among those who served the murderous old regime, Demidov must confront the darker aspects of his own past as well as the empire’s most violent discontents.

This is a good premise for a book, and I wish Smith had written a good book from it. I do not begrudge him the use of Russia’s most tragic period: history is not owned by anyone, though it is used better by some than others. John Le Carré, for one, has written some of the finest prose in any genre about the Cold War. But fine fiction does not follow the strictures of a contrived plot, or skip blithely over historical detail. Like fine detective work, it requires not only ambition – of which Smith seems to have plenty – but a good measure of diligence and love.