Stallion Gate
Wendell Minor (Jacket art) New York: Random House, 1986. First Edition [Stated], First Printing. Hardcover. [10], 321, [5] pages. Maps. Martin Cruz Smith (born November 3, 1942) is an American mystery novelist. He is best known for his nine-novel series (to date) on Russian investigator Arkady Renko, who was first introduced in 1981 with Gorky Park. From 1965 to 1969, Smith worked as a journalist and began writing fiction in the early 1970s. He wrote two Slocum adult action Western novels under the pen name Jake Logan. Smith has also written a number of other paperback originals, including a series about a character named "The Inquisitor", a James Bond-type agent employed by the Vatican; and a science fiction novel, The Indians Won. Smith wrote three novels in the Nick Carter series. Canto for a Gypsy, 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). The 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. Renko has since appeared in eight other novels by Smith. 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. In a New Mexico blizzard, four men cross a barbed-wire fence at Stallion Gate to select a test site for the first atomic weapon. They are Oppenheimer, the physicist; Groves, the general; Fuchs, the spy. The fourth man is Sergeant Joe Pena, a hero, informer, fighter, musician, Indian. These four men -- and a cast of soldiers, roughnecks and scientists -- will change history forever. Derived from a Kirkus review: The months leading up to the Los Alamos A-bomb test of July, 1945--as seen through the eyes of Sgt. Joe Pena, a Pueblo Indian who has been assigned as chauffeur/bodyguard to J. Robert Oppenheimer, a.k.a. "Oppy." (Oppy and Joe are old acquaintances from teen-age riding days in New Mexico.) In this slick mix of fact and fiction, Smith manages to put Joe in the midst of every conceivable conflict going on at Los Alamos--while also exploring Joe's identity-crises as a Native American with enough smarts and talent to make it in the white world. Joe's immediate boss is the Chief of Security, Capt. Augustino, a paranoid sadist who's secretly intent on proving that moody Oppenheimer is a Communist spy. Meanwhile, Joe is falling in love with another of Augustino's spy-suspects: mathematician Anna Weiss, a sexy German-Jewish refugee who begins to have grave doubts about the morality of an A-bomb, especially after Germany's surrender. Meanwhile, too, some local Pueblo Indians engage in minor attacks on the Los Alamos operation--so Joe finds himself reluctantly aiding these offbeat, elderly guerrillas, thus reasserting his Indian identity. And, when not fingering the real Soviet spy, Klaus Fuchs, Joe is planning his postwar future: in desperate need of $50,000 to buy the region's top jazz nightclub, Joe arranges to fight in a big-money match--which just happens to coincide with the night of the crucial bomb-test at Stallion Gate. Along the way, Smith's episodic narrative features several vividly detailed, shrewdly researched vignettes: a visit to the test-site with Oppy and Gen. Groves, director of the Manhattan Project; a black-comic truck ride with hot plutonium--and a fatuous psychiatrist--in tow; the extermination of radioactive cows; the dangerous, idiosyncratic preliminary bomb-tests; evocations of chic, boozy, wartime Santa Fe. But Joe is a sentimental, crassly synthetic all-purpose hero--a bright, sexy giant with talents, hang-ups, and loyalty-conflicts at every turn. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Atomic Bomb, Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, Los Alamos, Leslie Groves, Anna Weiss, Klaus Fuchs, Joe Pena, Refuge, Santa Fe, Native American, Pueblo
ISBN: 0394530063
[Book #84982]
Price: $37.50