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.

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.