The Secret Hours - Mick Herron

 I'm fairly sure I have reviewed all Herron's Slow Horses novel on this blog.   I had never even heard of The Secret Hours, Herron's latest book, and started it on the assumption that it is a standalone.   In fact it is much more.   Herron has excelled himself here, and I already held him in the highest esteem.

We start off with a retired spy under attack in his rural Devon bolthole.   Then we move to the Monochrome Inquiry, set up by a debased PM who earlier lost his job as Foreign Secretary when he allowed Russian agents to instal a dating app on his phone.   We are particularly interested in Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, Monochrome's attached civil servants, who are summoned to the Park by First Desk and informed in no uncertain terms that the inquiry is going precisely nowhere.

But then a kerfuffle in a supermarket sees Malcolm with a top secret file in his shopping.   He shows Griselda.   They copy the file and email to inquiry members.   Suddenly Monochrome is very much going somewhere.   They even a witness, who appears under the name Alison North, the name she used in the early Nineties when she was sent to Berlin by the legendary David Cartwright to 'check on procedures.'

Alison tells the panel what happened there.   About Head of Station Robin Bruce, a hopeless and doomed romantic, the actual man in charge Brinsley Miles, and Miles's friend Otis, the subject of the leaked file.   Who Miles really is - we can guess but even to the very last page we are never formally told.   Likewise Alison's identity is cunning held back until the climax of her time in Berlin.

Meanwhile Max Janacek, the allotted name of the Devon retiree, has made his way to London and looked up his supposed protectors at the Park's Housekeeping Department, notably John Bachelor, the drink-sodden milkman we have met before.   This is where Herron's great gift for characterisation kicks in.   Bachelor might be a sloppy drunk but he was once a professional, and even he can ride to the rescue in an emergency, which he does here.

What we have in The Secret Hours is an arm's length review of everything Herron has achieved to date.   It is his spy world, his spies and their back story.   Half the fun is guessing who's who.   Herron is too skillful to simply play games.   He seasons his complex story with regular surprises - not least, at the end, for First Desk.   Even Jackson Lamb would doff his proverbial cap to her for that.

A work of genius.

Reconstruction - Mick Herron

 Reconstruction (2008) is Mick Herron before Slough House.   Immediately before - so close on Jackson Lamb;s heels we can almost smell his fags.   But tt's not Slough House and it's not about Slow Horses.   Instead it's about how a Secret Service forensic accountant Ben Whistler ends up negotiating a hostage situation in Oxford in, of all places, a pre-school nursery.

The Dogs are here, and have clearly messed up.   The Dogs are unleashed because one of Ben's colleagues, Miro Weiss, has gone missing.   Along with quarter of a billion pounds syphoned off from the money that was supposed to be reconstructing Iraq.   Or, more exactly, from the funds that had already been syphoned off by the crooks who were contracted and sub-contracted to do something about the mess Bush and Blair had created in Iraq.   Miro has vanished without trace, which was not surprising, given that he had largely lived without trace.   Ben Whistler worked in the same office but barely knew him.   Then, out of the blue, Miro's boyfiend, Jaime Segura, rings the SIS asking for Ben Whistler.

The Dogs are unleashed: Bad Sam Chapman and Neil Ashton.   It's supposed to be a simple containment exerice.  The Queens of the Database know exactly where in London Jaime is.   All Bad Sam and his oppo have to do is ... not let Jaime see them coming.   But Jaime does see them coming.   He gives them the slip and hops on a bus that happens to be heading for Oxford.   Bad Sam and Ashton, naturally a little put out, track him to a layby just outside the city of sleeping spires.   Jaime runs.   Ashton decamps from the car and gives chase.   Ashton has a gun, which is news to his partner Sam.   It's a commuter road, rush hour.   Ashton slips, falls into the road and under a car.   The gun goes flying.   Jaime grabs it and flees.   The next thing we know he's wandering round South Oxford asking, not for Ben Whistler but The Lady.

Before you know it he's in the reception class annexe with a pair of toddler twins, two ladies, the guilty father of the twins and an unofficial SIS firearm.   Outside, the media is massing.   Since Bad Sam has gone off piste on business of his own, there's only one answer.   Send in Ben Whistler.

It takes a chapter to get used to how different Reconstruction is from the better known Herron of today.   In many ways it is better than the very latest Herron output because in Reconstruction he is still experimenting, still perfecting his authorial voice.   I ended up thoroughly loving it.   It bursts with twists and subplots and the characters are wonderfully diverse.   I am enthused.

Bad Actors - Mick Herron

 How hard a choice was this?  One of my favourite writers offering a take on my favourite subject.  OK, it was slightly disappointing when I realised it wasn't about substandard thespians.  The plus side is that it's Jackson Lamb and the Slow Horses at their very best.

Mick Herron gets better with every book.  The development here is structural.  We start with Act Two and then go back to Act One.  In terms of plotting and the unravelling thereof, it's very, very clever.  We also have the bonus of Shirley Dander on the rampage.  The Seige of the San by the Ultras is one of the best, perhaps the actual best, set pieces of the entire Slough House series.

We're what now?  Nine or ten novels in, plus extras like The Drop, the central character of which, John Bachelor, continues here.   The frame for Bad Actors is the really bad actors of the recent Tory government.  It is pretty obvious who the Machiavellian Andrew Sparrow is based on and there are absolutely no prizes for identifying the lying narcsicist he props up.   Sparrow has hired himself a super-forecaster (remember those?), a Swiss citizen called Dr Sophie de Greer.  John Bachelor sees her on TV and recalls a moment from his undistinguished past.  He recognises her mother in Dr Greer and the mother was not in any sense Swiss.  Bachelor tells Slow Horse Lech Wicinski.  You tell any Slow Horse anything and it will inevitably get to Jackson Lamb.   Meanwhile the power-crazed Sparrow is plotting to add Spook Street to his portfolio, which means unseating First Desk Diana Taverner, which in turn threatens the future of Slough House and Jackson Lamb's joes, which is never going to end well.

Bad Actors is a real treat, a perfect marriage of political lunacy and the essential madness of a professional espionage service.  Joyful in every way.

The Drop and The List - Mick Herron

 This is fun - two novellas associated with the Slow Horses of Slough House and Spook Street.  John Bachelor is not a Slow Horse - he's not that important.  He was always a low grade employee of the Secret Service and now he's a part-timer, working off-site, for peanuts.  Bachelor's role is called the milk round.  He looks after retired assets, former moles and agents now long retired, on Civil Service pensions, in safe, out-of-the-way accommodation.

Inevitably, old spooks die.  And Bachelor finds Dieter Hess dead in his chair, with a book on his lap and music on the CD player.  Not a bad way to go, and by no means unexpected.  Bachelor arranges the wake.  To his total horror, Diana Taverner, second desk at the Park, shows up, wanting a word.  Did Hess mention a second source of income?  How come Bachelor didn't know about the coded list under the carpet?

Bachelor needs to fix this - fast.  It doesn't take him long to figure out the code.  It's a list of people with German names.  Was Dieter a double?  Jackson Lamb soon identifies that problem.  But one of the names is more interesting than others.  A young woman, Hannah Weiss, living in England.  

That's The List.  The Drop opens with another of Bachelor's charges, Solomon Dortmund, witnessing an Old School 'drop' take place right in front of him in his favourite cafe.  He reports this to Bachelor, who shies away from reporting it to Lady Di.  Frankly, he'd rather she'd forgotten his existence, especially in his somewhat reduced circumstances.  But Solomon managed to get the name of the man making the drop out of a waiter and Bachelor asks a casual acquaintance of his at the Park to run the name.  All manner of chaos ensues as the snow starts to blanket London.

Herron really is on top of his form.  The clever thing here is the linkage of the two novellas.  Neither is sufficient for a novel, together they very nearly are.  And the linkage allows us the time to know more about the characters.  I hope we meet some of them again.

Slough House - Mick Herron

 

Slough House has been deleted from the Regent Park mainframe.  The Slow Horses are being tailed.  Ex-Slow Horses are being tracked down and killed.  Jackson Lamb, for all his innumerable faults, is not going to tolerate things happening to his joes - which is bad news for those who commit such affronts.

Diana Taverner, first desk at the Park, has meanwhile dabbled with privatisation.  Not for personal gain, of course, but because the GRU have been sending over idiots to spread toxic chemicals around English cities.  This turns out to be a mistake on many levels, not least of which is that, in her hour of need, she has to turn to Jackson Lamb.

Also back in the frame is Sid (Sidonie) Baker, who once took a bullet for River Cartwright, is back from the dead, hiding out at the country house River just inherited from the Old Bastard.  She thinks she is being pursued by Mormon missionaries.  The Yellow Vests are venting on the streets of London and Jackson Lamb meets a gay American of restricted growth who believes his boyfriend has been murdered on the orders of Vladimir Putin.

Mick Herron's alternative take on the Secret Service is back for a seventh anarchic romp - the best to date in my opinion.  The critical take on contemporary Britain is absolutely on the nose and there were many laugh out loud moments.  Herron is also excellent on the suspense, where needed, and the car chase through benighted rural Kent was beautifully done.  A masterpiece of its kind.

Joe Country - Mick Herron

Joe Country is the sixth in Herron's Jackson Lamb series, the exploits of the 'slow horses' MI5 has dumped at Slough House. It's not as deep as some of the others but on the other hand the black humour is much funnier. It continues the series without advancing the storylines very far.

Lamb is touchy after the way things ended in London Rules - i.e. with a bloodbath in Slough House itself. One thing everyone agrees about Lamb: he looks after his joes. Joes died in London Rules, Lamb's joes, and Lamb is not happy. He is not especially thrilled with his latest recruit, an analyst suspended from the Park after paedophile porn was found on his work laptop. Even Lamb draws the line somewhere. Meanwhile Louisa Guy is approached by the widow of her late partner Min Harper (a joe who died in an earlier novel), whose teenage son has gone missing in darkest Pembrokeshire.

Thus begins the drift of Lamb's entire team into Joe Country as the snows fall. River Cartwright is stalking his renegade father who showed up unexpectedly at the funeral of the legendary Old Bastard. J K Coe is uncharacteristically switched on; Emma Flyte, former head dog at the Park, creates a new partnership with Louisa, and Roddy Ho lends his digital expertise and - unwisely - his car. Back in London, recovering alcoholic Catherine Standish fills her flat with wine bottles, someone carves PAEDO on the new recruit's face, and Di Taverner, now at last First Desk at the Park, learns more than she wants to know about the recent behaviour of a leading royal.

It's all the usual bloodshed and laughter, if a little light on story, and it takes us to the brink of finding out about Lady Di's plan for the slow horses. Which I look forward to.

London Rules - Mick Herron

The Jackson Lamb series really hits its stride with London Rules. The regular characters have been whittled down to the best, extraneous or one-off characters are kept in their place. The plot is excellent - a bunch of terrorists working through a destabilisation scheme stolen from MI5 - but Lamb novels are not about plot. No, the interplay of dysfunctional characters is what makes it work.

Take for example Roderick Ho. We don't care how good he is at computer stuff. We take his digital prowess as read. What matters to us is what a wazzock he is - and in London Rules he is the wazzock to end all wazzocks. Shirley Dander has been to compulsory anger management classes, which is like an arsonist stocking up on firelighters. And J K Coe is starting to emerge from his shell. All these are great ideas. Recent instalments have centred on River and Louisa; here they take more of a backseat. I personally enjoyed the reappearance of Molly Doran, the legless archivist of Regent's Park.

Excellent. I would say Herron is currently top of his genre. But the thought occurs, is he not the inventor and sole practitioner of this genre?

Real Tigers - Mick Herron

Real Tigers is the third in what has come to be called the 'Slough House' series, named after the falling down building in Aldersgate where MI5 sends its rejects to wither or die of boredom. Slough House is the realm of Jackson Lamb, former super spy, now super slob. Say what you like about Jackson, he will never leave one of his joes in the field.


Catherine Standish is one of his joes. She's not exactly in the field - she's kidnapped by one of her old boyfriends as she leaves Slough House, but even so, Lamb is inclined to take it personally. Especially when River Cartwright, one of his slow horses, only still in the service because his grandfather was a big noise there during the Cold War, is detained against his will for having broken into the inner sanctum overlooking Regent's Park.


From that point on, Jackson Lamb is roused to action. His slow horses are given starter's orders. Even Roddy Ho, the annoying desk jockey, is sent into the field where his ability to hotwire a car or any similar form of transport comes in handy.


It is all set against a backdrop of pushy politicians in the Boris Johnson mould, dubious goings-on in the not so distant past, MI5's version of the X Files (the Grey Files or, in Lamb's somewhat riper phrase, the 'Dipshit Chronicles') and power plays for the soul, such as it is, of the Service itself.


By far the best of the series that I have read to date, which is saying something because I love them all.

Dead Lions - Mick Herron

Dead Lions is the second of Mick Herron's splendidly warped Jackson Lamb thrillers. I have previously read and reviewed the fourth, Spook Street. It really doesn't matter what order you read them in. The plots are standalone and the premise is always the same: Slough House is where MI5 buries the second rate spooks who are too young to pension off; Jackson Lamb, in charge of Slough House, is a loose cannon whose appalling behaviour is redeemed by his single principle in life, unswerving loyalty.

Dickie Bow, had he been younger, would have been marooned at Slough House. He was certainly a slow horse. But he was in Berlin with Jackson Lamb, and when Dickie meets his maker on a replacement bus from Reading station, Lamb feels honour-bound to stick his nose in. This leads to the death of one of Lamb's own, seconded to nursemaid a visiting Russian oligarch. River Cartwright, meanwhile, grandson of a legendary spook, uncovers what looks like a plot to crash a light aircraft into the City's latest skyscraper by a nest of long-entrenched Cold War agents.

Herron's plotting is second to none. As in Spook Street he manages to walk the delicate tightrope between comedy and suspense. The action sequences are truly thrilling, the black humour of the dialogue always amusing, often laugh-out-loud. Surely somebody has to adapt the series for TV?

Spook Street - Mick Herron

I hadn't come across Mick Herron before. Had I noticed the blurb from the Mail on Sunday I would never have picked Spook Street up, which would have been a shame because, though the Mail on Sunday has no sense or taste whatsoever, this really is an excellent, fresh take on contemporary British spy fiction.

For a start, it's sardonically comic. Jackson Lamb, our team leader, is an appalling slob. The team he leads at Slough House are known elsewhere in MI5 as 'slow horses'. They are, in short, the unmanageable ones.  They have initiated disaster at some point in their career but MI5 dare not sack them in case they go to the Press, in which case some officers who still have prospects might end up in the adjoining prison cell.

Still, even slow horses have their day. Sometimes a case arises which is inescapably their province. Here, the proper domestic spies are fully engaged with a suicide bombing in a shopping mall. River Cartwright, one of Lamb's team, goes to visit his grandfather who is suffering dementia. Only someone claiming to be River has already shown up. The old man, who is not so senile that he can't vaguely remember his own grandson, shoots him dead - because David Cartwright was once also an habitue of Spook Street, by no means a slow horse but a candidate for First Chair. Who has sent an assassin to kill him? Is the old man as gaga as he seems? And how come the assassin and the suicide bomber travelled on papers of British citizens who never existed but who were created by MI5 back in David Cartwright's day?

That is a plot that would suffice for any straightfaced spy novel. Herron is able to deliver more because his spooks are comic and to be able to laugh at or with them we have to know something of who they are. Thus Herron's misfits end up being more rounded than many leading characters in mainstream series (Spook Street is itself the fourth in a series). Drink and domestic problems are not enough to give the slow horses their edge. Thus we have Roddy Ho, deluding himself that he has a proper girlfriend; the homicidal Shirley, and J K Coe who, his colleagues conclude, is "either PTSD or a psychopath."
The bad guys are equally conflicted, equally well-drawn. The prose style is exactly right throughout and there is a twist about 80% of the way through that is as devastating as anything by the master of such things, Jo Nesbo (see, for example, the mighty Headhunters.

I hugely enjoyed Spook Street in every way - intellectually, artistically, and sheer laugh-out-loud. I'm off down the library tomorrow to hunt out more.