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.

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?

Deep Blue - Alan Judd

Alan Judd is an author who took his time to find his genre. He has been writing a long time - he won the Winifred Holtby Prize as long ago as 1981 - but has not been prolific until now, in his retirement from other professions.

His main character, Charles Thoroghgood, is now C, the Chief of MI6 but first appeared many years ago in a novel about the Irish Troubles, as a soldier, which Judd was in the late Sixties and Seventies. Here, Thoroughgood becomes embroiled in one of his earlier cases, a anarchist plot to steal a lump of radioactive cobalt to make an anti-nuclear point. Such things were big in the Eighties, when Charles failed to catch those he knew to be responsible. Now extreme leftwing views are again current, with the SNP threatening the break the Union and swivel-eyed Tories imposing intolerable austerity on the working classes. We have no enemies to blast with nuclear missiles but still we persist in paying untold billions for a deterrent that probably won't work anyway.

I must stress that much of the last paragraph reflects my views, not Judd's or Charles Thoroughgood's. Yes, I am that leftie whereas Judd, career soldier and diplomat, is plainly of the right. That doesn't and never should prevent him being a supremely skilled writer with a particular gift for plotting. Despite the cover blurb from his employers at the Telegraph, Judd is not anywhere near John le Carre as a writer of spy fiction, nor indeed Charles Cumming. Where Judd excels is in the depicting the world in which senior spies have to operate, hedged in by transitory ministers and their SPADs. The SPADs trope is brilliantly worked here in Deep Blue.

Having stumbled on Judd by accident I am keen to explore more of his work. Many of his titles appeal to me. There's one about Shakespeare's sword, a couple about Nazi Germany, and a new Thoroughgood called The Accidental Spy. Now he has turned seventy Judd is clearly knocking them out at an increased rate - Deep Blue was published in 2017 and we're only three weeks into 2018. His non-fiction seems especially important. He is the biographer of Ford Madox Ford, a writer with whom he would seem to have much in common, and the definitive biography of MI6's first C, Mansfield Cumming.

Typhoon - Charles Cumming

Typhoon is the fourth of Cumming's post Cold War spy novels. It comes straight after The Spanish Game, which I reviewed earlier this year and was greatly impressed by. It shares some of the same elements - revolutionary terrorism in a forlorn corner of an apathetic nation - but here the nation is China and the minority the Uighurs of Xinjiang province. I have to be honest, I had never heard of the Uighurs, and in a way I guess that's Cumming's point. I also have to admit, I did not love Typhoon.


It's not the theme, setting or essential plot that bothers me - it is certainly not the writing which is as good as Cumming always is - it's the structure. Cumming has chosen two major events of China's emergence into the free market world, the hand-back of Hong Kong in 1997 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and decided to link them. The narrative is thus in two halves. This is not in itself a problem. The problem is that nothing thrilling happens in 1997 except the domestic difficulties of spy life, and the first half is therefore far too long. Others might have tried for the same effect through flashback but I don't believe it would have worked any better - probably worse. The problem is there is far too much backstory and it's just not interesting enough. The second half, on the other hand, is almost entirely brilliant, the plot racing along nicely. The end, I'm afraid, is a bit of a dud, sadly underwritten. Cumming cuts away from the action too soon. He has already given the game away in fact, in an irritating prologue involving an even more irritating occasional narrator, a writer called Will. Will serves no purpose whatsoever as he is not present at 99% of the action. The only purpose he does serve is, as I indicated a few sentences ago, he strips the narrative of jeopardy. We know from the start that the hero, the good honest spy Joe Lennox, survives whatever is coming later.


Reading Typhoon, I was constantly reminded of Le Carre's The Perfect Spy, which I have been reading sporadically for well over a year and just cannot come to terms with. One the one hand I hate it for its endlessly looping narrative and lack of narrative drive, on the other I have to admire the sheer skill that has gone into writing it. Being compared with Le Carre is no bad thing. Maybe Typhoon is Cumming's Perfect Spy, not the most enjoyable of his output but an essential landmark in the development of a great writer.

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.

The Spanish Game - Charles Cumming

Cumming is 21st century British spy fiction at its best. The Spanish Game (2006) is an early novel (his third) but is fully accomplished. Alec Milius is living in Madrid, not really on the run, but hiding out from the espionage world which he flirted with in an earlier novel with disastrous results all round.


Gradually he gets drawn back. He becomes involved with ETA, the Basque Separatists, and the secretive but real rightwing GAL. This is the tricky part of any spy story - why does the hero bother? This is where Cumming shows his mastery. Milius gets involved because he is working for an ex-pat banker who needs a report for a client on the likelihood of Basque autonomy. The boss, Julian Church, sets up a meeting with colourful Basque politician Mikel Arenaza. Alec and Mikel bond during a night on the town in San Sebastian. Mikel arranges to meet up with Alec in Madrid. He calls from the airport to say he is on his way, but never arrives. Naturally Alec is curious. Inevitably he has the skillset to investigate...


To be fair, the story takes a while to get going. There seems to be too much backstory in the early chapters but believe me, it has to be there to justify the ending - which is downright brilliant. Cumming already had his character from previous novels and again he deals with it innovatively, by building our understanding of Alec's state of mind, the paranoia which means he simply cannot go straight to authorities with his theories about Mikel. Cumming is very, very clever - by some distance the best spy novelist of his generation.

A Colder War - Charles Cumming

Cumming first came to prominence with A Foreign Country, which won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best thriller of the year and the Bloody Scotland crime book of the year, both in 2012.  The protagonist of that book, the forty-something disgraced SIS operative Thomas Kell, returns in A Colder War.

The premise is similar.  Still under investigation for his role in unlawful rendition and torture Kell is called back to action by the misfortune of an old friend and colleague, in this instance Paul Wallinger, chief British spy in Ankara, is killed in a dubious flying 'accident' immediately after a high profile operation he was running with the Americans goes spectacularly tits-up.

It's a mole-hunt with the personal undertones - Kell becomes passionately involved with Wallinger's daughter, and she becomes unexpectedly involved with the mole-hunt.  We know who the mole is fairly early in proceedings but Cumming is nevertheless able to maintain the suspense levels to the very end.  He has, in many ways, taken up the spy world where John le Carre left it.  Kell is not entirely dissimilar to George Smiley, though he does have a much more active personal life.  Cumming is now a major player in the genre.  I look forward to Kell's next appearance.  In the meantime I must try one of Cumming's standalone novels, perhaps the first, A Spy by Nature.