It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by those of us who inhabit the shade of Tim Shipman, Shane Whaley and the other learned denizens of the Spybrary community, that we are living through a golden age of spy fiction unrivalled since the original espionage frenzy of the early sixties.
Some have bubbled through to the public consciousness in showy ways – Mick Herron and his humour rendered in technicolour by Apple TV springs to mind – but Charlotte Philby, David McCloskey, Paul Vidich, Jeremy Duns (currently on sabbatical) and Charles Cumming are all regularly producing work so good it must be sought out.
As in any movement, however coincidental and loosely affiliated, there are the second tier-dwellers selected either for their real world espionage experience, their existing celebrity or their superb prose.
In Simon Conway, however, we have a writer very much moving into Mount Rushmore territory: he’s the complete package. A real world background of derring do straight out of a Boys Own adventure story, prose which oscillates between swingeing, biting satire and punch you in the face exciting.
He’s never been less than of the top tier – but here, his latest novel propels into the premier league.
He’s also consistent. ‘The British Agent’ may be his best yet, but ‘A Loyal Spy’, ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Saboteur’ are also explosive spy stories of the very best.
In ‘The British Agent’, Conway arrives with a new publisher and an adapted writing style.
Penguin’s Michael Joseph imprint have delivered a Conway with shorter chapters, even more globe trotting locations and action to keep you on the edge of your seat.
The punchier chapters and the characteristic action ensure that Conway can weave his trademark political insights through this world of double crosses and bluffs.
In Chuff, Conway’s undercover British agent thrust undercover in a twisty turny American-made conspiracy the writer delivers an intriguing and hard nosed female hero who could happily break noses and rearrange testicles with McCloskey’s Artemis Proctor or Peter O’Donnell’s
Modesty Blaise (to name two outstanding spy heroines who span the two golden ages).
I’ve read a lot of novels this year for various reasons: few have been as engaging, as enjoyable or begin to compare with ‘The British Agent’ and I desperately hope a sequel is in the works.
The cover of the latest Mick Herron novel, ‘Slough House’
‘Kill us? They’ve never needed to kill us,’ said Lamb. ‘I mean, look at us. What would be the point?’
A year after a calamitous blunder by the Russian secret service left a British citizen dead from novichok poisoning, Diana Taverner is on the warpath. What seems a gutless response from the government has pushed the Service’s First Desk into mounting her own counter-offensive – but she’s had to make a deal with the devil first. And given that the devil in question is arch-manipulator Peter Judd, she could be about to lose control of everything she’s fought for.
Meanwhile, still reeling from recent losses, the slow horses are worried they’ve been pushed further into the cold. Slough House has been wiped from Service records, and fatal accidents keep happening. No wonder Jackson Lamb’s crew are feeling paranoid. But have they actually been targeted?
With a new populist movement taking a grip on London’s streets, and the old order ensuring that everything’s for sale to the highest bidder, the world’s an uncomfortable place for those deemed surplus to requirements. The wise move would be to find a safe place and wait for the troubles to pass.
But the slow horses aren’t famed for making wise decisions.
I wasn’t having the best of weeks. A family member died of Covid and, you know, 2021 was about as far removed from the joy of 2020 as A to B.
To compound my joy, I was revisiting an old novel I had begun years ago to see if there was anything there.
There wasn’t. I gave up. Then I opened ‘Slough House’.
This confirmed two things for me: I have the same talent in my entire body as Mick Herron has in a clipped toenail and I should abandon writing prose forever. Immediately.
And that good writing – the really good, exceptionally paced, the stuff described and as winningly put together as this, will offer an escape from grief and lack of talent in a way we should cling to like a life raft.
Because, by God, he’s good.
It didn’t take long for me to be laughing – not something I expected on that day, I don’t mind admitting.
‘Slough House’ begins, after the Prologue, with the traditional disembodied guided tour of our favourite, dilapidated office building. It’s been a wind, a cat and now it’s a rat – sorry, an estate agent, (even worse.)
“Authentic period detail there, and the seventies is a decade that’s coming back, isn’t it, what with the riots, the recession, the racism – ha! Our little joke. But no, really.”
When we lost the Maestro at the fag end of last year, Herron’s name came up quite a bit. I’ve had my say on Le Carré elsewhere and my abiding love for the work but one of the irritations I find is the constant repetition in some circles citing Herron as the new Le Carré.
He isn’t.
He’s the current Herron and we better embrace him now because he’s to be savoured and enjoyed while he’s on the go.
Author Mick Herron poses alongside Lamb’s Passage. Not somewhere the Slow Horses would want to be…
Le Carré, Lord knows no stranger to anger at politicians or lacking cynicism, never wrote a sentence like “This was the spook trade, and when things went awry on Spook Street, they generally went the full Chris Grayling.”
But you just know he’d have liked to.
He’s not the new Le Carré, despite the terminology of his own making and the Connie-like Molly in the Archives. He’s the current Herron and we better embrace him now because he’s to be savoured.
I say “savoured” but I’m, well, lying.
I last read one of the Slow Horse novels, ‘Joe Country’, in May 2019 and I should have done my due diligence before starting this one.
But I’m a glutton for Herron and so I had to sheepishly beg Slow Horse expert – owner of honeyed tones and producer of Slough House podcast ‘Barbican Station’ extraordinaire, Jeff Quest- to remind me who had died and how because I’d lost track.
In my defence, prose like:
‘But she deserved to die. Even Gandhi would admit that.’
‘Did it never occur to you that for a supposed backwater of the Security Service, we suffer a lot of fatalities?’
‘I’ve always assumed that was down to public demand.’
Prose like that is so good it needs to be gulped down.
And so what does this instalment of the series bring? Sort of everything you want. Jackson Lamb is still a big man with a foul mouth and an odd imperviousness to HR complaints.
Di Tavernier is exactly as evil as you hope. Peter Judd is as duplicitous, sleazy and so toned down compared to real world politicians he’s almost preferable.
Satire? “The paths to power of current world leaders – paths including conspiracy to assault, knee-jerk racism, indeterminate fecundity and cheating at golf – were so askew from the traditional routes that only an idiot would have dared forecast future developments.” Check.
This time, it’s not just Slough House which has come to life. Even the other buildings in the area are personified and living in petrified fear. “Down here, a few timid retail premises huddled; the kind that looked like they’d not survive ten minutes in the open air.”
Mick Herron is about to go stratospheric. He’s already part of a dominating duopoly of the finest spy writers around alongside Charles Cumming. In my opinion, they will soon to be joined by Simon Conway, whose novel ‘The Stranger’ was hands down the best novel I read in 2020 (including Cumming’s exceptionally strong ‘Box 88’)
Gary Oldman in costume as Jackson Lamb as reported by the Daily Mail
But as soon as Gary Oldman dons the dirty mac of Lamb for Apple TVs adaptation, he’s going to reach a new audience. With that will come the petty jealousies, the hatchet the reviews, the constant nagging that he’s not as good as he was.
Well, if this novel proves anything, it is that he is. At one stage, the narrator says: “‘Make it, don’t fake it’ was Channel Go’s mission statement, unless it was its mantra, or its logo. But its general thrust was to encourage choleric rage in its viewers, so, if nothing else, Cantor had tapped into the spirit of the times.”
As had Cantor, so too has Herron. And long may he continue to do so.
‘Slough House’ is dirty; ‘Spook Street’: deadly. Now we have the duplicity of ‘Joe Country’ – perhaps the next stop for Mick Herron’s ‘Slow Horses’ will be a devious ‘Intelligence Continent’?
As it is, ‘Joe Country’ is a fine addition to the series. Few writers can weave such deft description and pacy plotting – garnished with lashings of humour and even dashes of pathos – as Herron and each novel builds to a crescendo in which the reader is left feeling both traumatised and hungry for the next instalment.
There’s little doubt that Herron is a confident writer at the top of his game. This series has become famous for its openings: Dickensian wanders through locations in an omniscient voice quite unlike other writers working today. Here, he sheds this trope, instead opting for a reveal different to the structure of the other texts.
His confidence has also been apparent for a while in his wanton profligacy with his characters. It must take iron nerves for a writer to dispose of such well-rounded, independent characters brimming with such vim and spark as these Slow Horses. And yet, here again, Herron is prepared to dispose of them with abandon. As in the old TV series Spooks (MI:5 in the US), no one is safe and this means no reader can ever truly relax that their favourite character won’t end up at the knackers yard in the next ten pages.
Finally, there is Jackson Lamb. A Rabelaisian grotesque, becoming progressively more grotesque by the novel. And, in truth, Lamb is actually my biggest quibble of this first rate book. He dominates the proceedings so completely that you pine for his nastiness when he is off stage. This is Banquo as central character, relegating Macbeth to bit part player by sheer force of personality (or blackened toe wiggling through undarned sock, if you will).
There are a few minor worries deriving from Lamb which I hope are me being hyper critical. He keeps “appearing” and “vanishing” like an obese Paul Daniels – or a less creepy David Blaine – and I hope this doesn’t signal either Lamb as supernatural entity or that Herron is now so successful that he has entered the realm of the uneditable: too grand for repetitions to be noted and corrected. I think not on the whole.
‘Joe Country’ is proof, if any were needed, that Herron stands at the pinnacle of the espionage genre, (possibly snug on the heights with Jeremy Duns and Charles Cumming). Others have already noted it is not a book which would reward readers unfamiliar with the series but for all that, I hope the Slow Horses have many more races left to run.
In short: Horses far from in need of the knacker’s yard: 4/5*
PAJ Newman 