Gotham Calling

Having recently read what may very well be my favorite Mick Herron novel so far, The Secret Hours, I was going to write one of Gotham Calling’s occasional pieces about spy yarns without pictures inside… Between this and catching up on the latest season of the Slow Horses show, though, I found myself actually doing a whole post about Slough House, Herron’s book series about an MI5 unit made up of agents – derogatorily called ‘slow horses’ – who fucked up in the past and who are now assigned with boring and demeaning tasks as a punishment/encouragement to quit.

“The only reason for the absence of a sign requiring entrants to abandon all hope is that, as every office worker knows, it’s not the hope that kills you.

It’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you that kills you.”

• Real Tigers

I’ve previously praised the series’ first two instalments, Slow Horses and Dead Lions. In the meantime, I’ve binged through the remaining books, novellas, and spin-offs, so I can now give a fuller overview of the series.

Overall, it’s quite consistent. New characters keep joining the cast and sometimes dying off, but Slough House itself is a strong unifying setting, pulling in various kinds of broken people who mostly dream about going back to proper MI5 work but gradually realize the forces that be won’t ever let them leave (‘It’s like the Hotel California,’ Louisa elaborated. ‘Only for demoted spooks instead of cokehead clubbers.’).

Mick Herron has been branded as the new John le Carré, but that’s just simplistic. One of the most defining aspects of le Carré’s writing was its authenticity, with believable characters and situations that seemed like they could’ve actually taken place (especially since the author appeared to be drawing on his own experience as a former secret agent). It’s the kind of vibe you can find in a show like The Bureau, which explores the psychological toll and moral dilemmas of undercover work – and which even features a George Smiley-like figure in Henri Duflot (as well as a Russian doll motif in the final season, evoking the BBC’s adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, le Carré’s classic about a mole hunt in the upper echelons of the organization he called the Circus).

By contrast, the Slough House books work best when read through the lenses of black comedy: when they strain credibility, it’s more a feature than a bug… because the priority is to be funny and entertaining rather than realistic (which is not to say these things cannot converge every once in a while). To be sure, Herron himself mocks the epithet in The Secret Hours, which cheekily introduces ‘an espionage novelist whose recent decalogy about a mole hunt in the upper echelons of what she referred to as the Fairground had her pegged by some as the heir to Le Carré – one of an admittedly long list of legatees.’

With their sardonic voice and quasi-satirical tone, these novels feel much closer to the earlier spy fiction of Len Deighton. Like Deighton, Herron doesn’t necessarily know much about the actual world of intelligence services – what does ring authentic is the general picture of workplace dynamics, office politics, and individual pettiness. It also helps that Herron nails the feeling of London in a highly recognizable way, from its various social types (‘a mixed bunch, all saggy-crotched jeans and unlaced trainers, broadcasting the usual Jamaican patois of the London-born teenager’) to its evolving architecture (hence the city’s centrality in the covers).

That said, I love how Mick Herron comes up with wild spy schemes drawing on tropes like sleeper agents, false flag operations, and elaborate cover-ups. While the premises may be far from what spies do in the real world, they involve fascinating concepts nonetheless. Herron seems basically interested in narratives of conspiracy and misdirection, not unlike Jorge Luís Borges, who arguably wrote some of the most inventive spy narratives ever (‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’ ‘The Form of the Sword,’ ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’). His plotting typically involves a lengthy chain of surprises, cliffhangers, switcheroos, and triple-crosses while making the most out of the extensive cast – everyone plays a significant role in each story at some point, contributing to save the day and/or to further screw it up. As much as the abusive, flatulent head of Slough House, Jackson Lamb, tends to steal the spotlight in reviewers’ accounts, this is a team book series, through and through.

Along with Herron’s storytelling prowess comes a talent for worldbuilding, gradually fleshing out a coherent version of MI5 and of the whole government apparatus that surrounds it. There is internal slang, like the Dogs (security) and the Vampires (interrogators, ‘whose job it is to draw blood from stones’). There are bureaucratic details, like the fact that sensitive data gets hidden in the second-highest classification of secrecy, because ‘those most likely to wangle access to intelligence – oversight committees, Cabinet ministers, TV producers – tended to focus their attention on the highest grade.’ And even if the description of a spy’s funeral may not resemble the real thing, it’s certainly a wittily written piece imagining how such a setting could look like and how such a ceremony could unfold:

 “Funerals are private affairs, and never more so than at the Spooks’ Chapel, where many cover stories had been laid to rest and last words said over careers that had blossomed in dark corners, some so successfully that even close friends and family remained unaware of their true nature. But, as Jackson Lamb had been known to remark, suits’ bodies were easier to find than those of joes, and messy ends didn’t lead to tidy burials. So inside the chapel, on the west wall, were plaques to the memory of those who hadn’t made their way home, a display some called the Last Dead Letter Drop. The names on the plaques weren’t always those their owners had been born with, but there was a case for saying that the name you died with carried more weight. The identity you never let go of; that, in the end, let go of you instead.”

• Joe Country

Plus, of course, the characters. Sure, they’re grotesque and often fuck-ups to the point of caricature, but Herron manages to breathe life into them. Even as we laugh, we come to know and care for these people, including the most extreme cases, like the drug-fueled, out-of-control Shirley Dander or the narcissistic tech asshole Roddy Ho. Somehow, this even applies to Jackson Lamb, whose main drive appears to be neither ideological nor nationalist, but rather a sense of ownership of his ‘joes,’ which can translate into abuse as much as into protection or determination to avenge their pointless deaths… And yet, he isn’t just grumpy, but truly mean-spirited, his dialogue ticking practically all conceivable politically incorrect boxes, often in the form of puns. He really treats the team – and everyone else around him – like shit, albeit with the most irresistible put-downs (‘I swear to God I’d defect, if there was anywhere worth defecting to these days.’).

No wonder Mick Herron delights in writing Lamb. I’m sure Herron has a more friendly personality, but he seems to have a special appreciation for the art of crafting the most twisted disparaging remarks:

“He wore a short-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the neck over brown corduroy trousers, and was compensating for the thinness of his pale red hair by growing a moustache. It was impossible to tell how long he’d been working on this, and nearly as difficult to refrain from suggesting he stop.”

• Real Tigers

The fun, then, is throwing various types of losers and social misfits, not into a le Carré-like grounded intrigue (which is already full of flawed agents anyway), but into more high-pitched spy thrillers. For all the very intricate plotting, the books are also full of action, violence, and larger-than-life figures spinning convoluted and complex plans… For instance, Real Tigers culminates in a long, massive shootout climax that beats anything Ian Fleming ever wrote.

The thing is that in the middle of all the killings and chases you don’t find traditional heroes, but rather frustrated and/or seriously deluded slow horses. Even River Cartwright, despite having been framed and having benefitted from the mentorship of his grandfather (an old bastard affectionately known as O.B.) who used to pull the strings at MI5 back in the day, turns out to be as misguided and maladjusted in his own way. So, in a novel like Spook Street, where the villain is a Jason Bourne-like super-assassin, the fact that our heroes are so far out of his league provides both laughs and genuine thrills, making the villain a menacing – and ultimately quite deadly – threat.

“Bond would have leaped from the bridge onto a passing bus, or drop-kicked a motorcyclist and hijacked his wheels. Bourne would have surged the streets on car roofs, or slipped into parkour mode, bouncing off walls and wheelie bins, always knowing which alley to cut through…

River threw a quick glance at the nearby row of Boris bikes, shook his head, and ran down into the Tube station.”

• Real Tigers

As a result of this contrast, the stakes are often quite high. Practically every novel finishes on a different status quo, with some cast members killed, fired, or having quit… and so it’s not unusual for a volume to start with new additions to the team, generating a familiar beat as we wait to find out what kind of mistake condemned the latest member to Slough House. Aware that this has become a recognizable feature of the series, Herron started to play with readers’ expectations and taking advantage of the fact that (almost) no character seems safe. Joe Country is particularly mischievous in this regard, opening with a teaser that both hints and misleads about who is going to get it by the end of the volume.

I should point out, though, that while some of the cast members are bumbling, delusional, and/or psychopaths, most of the key characters tend to be devious and intelligent, so it’s a joy to see their constant bluffs and metaphorical chess moves.

“If Diana Taverner ever self-destructed, she’d find a way of doing so to her own advantage.”

• Real Tigers

Speaking of stakes, right from the outset, the Slough House books offer War on Terror narratives, exploring not so much Islamic terrorism itself, but all the panic, security apparatus, and conspiracy theories that came with it. In most stories, there is a terrorist threat and/or attack, yet the investigation tends to reveal some peccadillo of the British secret services themselves which has somehow come back to bite them in the arse… It’s a good hook, although Herron’s overreliance on it risks making the series feel a bit repetitive. Either because he’s aware of this danger, or just because he enjoys commenting on the present, in later books a new type of tension comes to the foreground, namely between the public and private sectors, no doubt reflecting the real-world expansion of companies’ political influence, government outsourcing, and ensuing corruption. 

I suppose this political angle is where things come closer to John le Carré’s body of work, but, again, I can’t overstate how different in style the two writers are. For one thing, Herron’s prose is very formulaic. Every book in the main series has the same overall structure, starting with a cold opening followed by a tour of Slough House – and inevitably returning there in the end. The sub-chapters are almost always around three-pages long (which helps make the books such addictive page-turners) with the only major exceptions taking place in Joe Country and Bad Actors: those contain a few chapters that break with this format through long sequences that smoothly jump from POV to POV, creating a peculiar effect that evokes a long tracking shot in a film that is otherwise made of quick cuts.

If I had to pick out one of his works that does read like something that could’ve been written by le Carré, I would go with the novella The Drop, where Herron’s witticisms generally come across as more lyrical and restrained in terms of lowbrow puns and pop culture references. Otherwise, the prose is generally much less pretentious than le Carré, with enough wordplay to rival Terry Pratchett… which is not to say that Herron is above (or below?) throwing a nod to Homer’s The Odyssey when he feels like it:

“In some parts of the world dawn arrives with rosy fingers, to smooth away the creases left by night. But on Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, it comes wearing safe-cracker’s gloves, so as not to leave prints on windowsills and doorknobs; it squints through keyholes, sizes up locks, and generally cases the joint ahead of approaching day.”

• London Rules

The series’ chronology is not very rigorous, requiring a Marvel-like sliding timeline for things to make sense. The books are written years apart but usually set only months apart, creating clashes with the many real-world allusions, including some clear time markers. If you accept that the first book took place in 2010 and actually stick to this timeline, the months-long intervals between tales don’t jive with 2016’s Brexit vote, which must have happened before The Drop (which takes place just a few weeks before Joe Country and leads straight into it).

Moreover, the notion that all these books are taking place within a relatively compressed period of time undermines the core premise: if there is less than a year between stories, then Slough House is not a peripheral place where failed agents are bored to death; it’s an exciting, if deadly, forefront in the fight against important threats, constantly involved in action-packed scenarios. Bad Actors compensates for some of this by skipping ahead further in time (basically jumping over the covid-19 pandemic), although it’s still best not to give the timings too much thought.

In turn, the sequence is pretty rigid, so it pays off to read the books in order. After you’re done with Slow Horses (2010) and Dead Lions (2013), you’ll want to check out The List (2015). This very cool novella follows the discovery that a recently deceased joe might’ve been a double agent all along, which prompts an amusing spiral of twists, once again revolving around the notion that some spies are bound to approach their missions with the same dismissive spirit as many workers approach their underpaid jobs.

Crucially, before jumping back into the regular series, make sure you don’t miss the spin-off novel Nobody Walks (2015), a revenge thriller that gradually shifts into other genres (much like the video game at the core of the plot), eventually settling on a cross between a spy tale and a crime yarn. It’s a different type of story, but written in the same style of prose… and with Heron’s signature move of populating the narrative with master manipulators playing elaborate mind games as they try (and sometimes manage) to think three steps ahead of everyone else. There are key supporting roles by figures from the Slough House universe and the book even introduces a couple of characters who later joined the main series. It should definitely be read before Spook Street (and since the ending of Real Tigers flows so smoothly into Spook Street, I recommend reading Nobody Walks even before picking up Real Tigers).

Real Tigers (2016) starts with Batman kicking Spider-Man’s ass (on page 3!), so it had me from the get-go… That said, this is actually a pretty bizarre cold open even once it gets haphazardly explained later on (no wonder they left it out of the Apple TV+ adaptation, besides the obvious IP implications). The main inciting incident, which comes some pages later, involves one of the slow horses getting kidnapped and, needless to say, the initial response to this is as preposterous as it is irresponsible. As usual, each chapter reveals a further layer to the antagonists’ agenda, this time gradually venturing evermore inwards, with the government and the services full of cunning and conniving bastards conspiring against each other.

“In the same hand that held his cigarette Lamb was wielding a Danish pastry, and he waved it now in their general direction. ‘You know, seeing you all together, it reminds me why I come into work every morning.’

Golden crumbs and blue-grey smoke flew in opposite directions.

‘It’s cause I’ve a cockroach infestation at home.’”

• Real Tigers

Spook Street (2017) opens with a bang (literally). I try to keep these descriptions relatively vague, so as not to spoil too much, but let’s just say this story hits even closer to home than usual, not only because of a death at the Cartwright household early on (and because the ensuing investigation reveals some of the dirt in the O.B.’s past), but also because there is a vicious action scene at Slough House itself, building on our knowledge of the place’s geography, set up by all those tours at the beginning and end of previous books.

As for London Rules (2018), it’s more of the same, but even more so… By this stage, the plots and characters have become quite caricatural. Not that the series didn’t go for its fair share of silly comedy in earlier instalments, but this seems like the volume where Herron really let loose, embracing the notion that he’s writing, above all, a broad farce (or perhaps just reflecting the fact that, in the aftermath of Brexit, the real world itself seemed to have become more outrageously ridiculous).

After that, the plotting became more inward-looking. The Drop (2018) is a direct sequel to The List, set a few years later, after Brexit (which actually gave a greater payoff to the original’s premise). Similarly, the novels Joe Country (2019) and Sough House (2021) are particularly reliant on the backstory accumulated throughout the series, picking up loose threads from various previous installments (even going back to seeds planted in the very first one). They still make sense if read as standalone, but I wouldn’t suggest doing it if you can avoid it.

“All over the world banks were becoming coinless, cars driverless, offices paper-free. Here in Slough House they were taking up the slack, as if in Newtonian response to refinements made elsewhere: an equal and opposite surfeit of unnecessary busywork.”

• Joe Country

There are two shorter pieces in between Joe Country and Slough House. Like the other novellas, The Catch (2020) largely revolves around the parallel saga of John Bachelor, who is not a slow horse but, somehow, still manages to be the most depressing loser employed by MI5… In The Catch, he deals with some of the fallout from Joe Country, even if he’s not entirely aware of what happened (readers don’t have to be, either). Herron’s plotting is as serpentine as ever, although by now veteran readers may be on to him: once you figure out there is always a further cynical twist to the narrative, you’ll probably start spotting some characters’ Machiavellian schemes ahead of their revelation. Still, the amusing dialogue and descriptions are by themselves enough to make it a fun ride.

In the short story ‘The Last Dead Letter’, Lamb and the take-no-shit archivist Molly Doran (one of many charismatic recurring characters) discuss an old case, from back before the Berlin Wall was torn down. Although their banter has the usual wordplay, the case is actually pretty grim and told like effective, non-ironic Cold War fiction. Herron is once again stretching his writing muscles.

You can also see this in the latest official novel in the series, Bad Actors (2022), whose premise involves the search for a missing forecaster, against the background of the secret services’ rivalry with the prime minister’s advisors (two castes of unelected figures with limited accountability). The narrative is more ambitiously constructed, with an effective Tarantinoesque non-linear chronology and a finer balance between twisty political intrigue (everyone plays each other and/or gets played) and a couple of Tom Sharpe-ish sub-climaxes where all hell breaks loose during some particularly chaotic operations involving multiple players and wild cards. This book was followed by the Christmas-themed short story ‘Standing by the Wall,’ which contains a hilarious riff on It’s a Wonderful Life.

I said Bad Actors was the latest ‘official’ novel because The Secret Hours (2024) has been advertised as a standalone work. I suppose it’s true that you can read it without having read any of the others and easily follow the whole plot and reach a sense of resolution by the end. Still, it features several characters from the main series and it fills in much of the backstory of previous tales – in particular, the present-day action follows Bad Actors’ denouement and an extended flashback to the 1990s ties directly into ‘Standing by the Wall’ (which can be read before or afterwards… perhaps the latter option works better, so as to avoid spoilers).

In fact, I’d classify The Secret Hours as a key book in the series, with the additional appeal that it’s one hell of a spy yarn, somehow merging an intense man-on-the-run thriller (culminating in a classic, Bourne-like ‘all cameras on him’ set piece), an innocent newbie abroad story (shades of Graham Greene), an indictment of the callousness within all secret services (even if an explanation in the penultimate page seems a bit too contrived for my taste), and the usual bureaucratic government machinations. The latter subplot includes a pathetic inquiry committee (complete with a mole whodunnit), allowing Herron to once again display an unparalleled skill at turning the most potentially boring meetings into lively, engrossing pieces of manipulation and passive aggression:

“No, you described the transition of Housekeeping duties as having been ‘successful’. I’m wondering what criteria you’re adopting to arrive at that conclusion. If they involve the late or non-existent provision of goods and services, then yes, I’d be the first to agree, the new dispensation is proving something of a smash hit. If, on the other hand, you bend towards the notion that success requires, at a bare minimum, the fulfillment of promises made and undertakings given, then your use of the word stems from either a woeful ignorance of the situation or a willful distortion of the true state of affairs.”

• The Secret Hours

Batman #519