Martin Cruz Smith passed away over the weekend. The Rap Sheet has a short item, but I haven’t seen any other coverage.
I find the Arkady Renko books fascinating in the abstract, but I’ve never actually gotten around to reading any of them. (I did, however, see the film version of “Gorky Park”, but I don’t find it really memorable.) I guess he’s another one of those series authors where, now that there’s a defined end to the series, I can start reading…
Samuel Abt, writer for the NYT and The International Herald Tribune. Anong other work, he covered the Tour de France for the papers for close to 30 years.
I remember reading his coverage, back in the Lance Armstrong days when I followed the Tour.
In an Opinion article in The Times published shortly before Armstrong lost his titles, Mr. Abt expressed sympathy for the cyclist, whom he had known since the early 1990s and with whom he had had a sometimes friendly, sometimes strained relationship.
“The internet and mass media are in a frenzy of condemnation now,” he wrote. “I have not read or heard any sorrow or compassion about a man stripped of his honor.”