YMMV / Gorky Park

• Home Grown Hero: The victim is American, and his brother, a NYPD detective, plays a major role in the story.
• Iron Woobie: Chief Investigator Arkady Renko. He's gone as far as he ever will in his line of work due to his refusal to join the Communist Party. His wife is cheating on him, and making him look like the bad guy for it, in addition to just generally harping on him constantly, his father is as disappointed as a father can realistically get in his son because he didn't pursue a career in the Red Army or join the Communist Party, his mother committed suicide when he was a child, and he unwittingly helped her do so. Most of this before the book even starts with him being called in to investigate a mysterious triple-murder in Gorky Park.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Kirwill’s disemboweled corpse in the film.
  • The final interrogation of Irina in the film, in the shed where she and her friends helped smuggle the sables. Specifically, the part where Renko pulls the reconstruction of Valerya out of the box, the same reconstruction made using her skull, to show Irina that she really is dead.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • In the film adaptation, Prof. Andreyev is Emperor Palpatine.
  • Anton is played by Vernon Dursley.
  • Iamskoy is played by Ian Bannen and the Moscow Police Inspector General is played by Alexander Knox - both playing key roles in the 1979 TV series version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
  • The "greasy parasitic pimp" Golodkin is played by British comedy star Alexei Sayle.

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