For nearly a decade, the best site on the internet, and the accompanying podcast, for fans of espionage books has been the mighty Spybrary.
I am not impartial, I was there from very early on and have appeared as a guest on a few episodes, but believe me when I say, it’s the friendliest, most informed and – frankly – expensive in terms of highlighting new books to read – place on the internet.
Control over there is the mighty Shane who had piloted both the pod and the Facebook group since day one.
Now, he’s revamped the website and made it easier to navigate as well even better for mobile.
He’s also recruiting agents to publish their reviews (if you have something give him a shout shane@spybrary.com
Two years ago, a hostile Prime Minister launched the Monochrome inquiry, investigating “historical over-reaching” by the British Secret Service. Monochrome’s mission was to ferret out any hint of misconduct by any MI5 officer—and allowed Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, the two civil servants seconded to the project, unfettered access to any and all confidential information in the Service archives in order to do so.
But MI5’s formidable First Desk did not become Britain’s top spy by accident, and she has successfully thwarted the inquiry at every turn. Now the administration that created Monochrome has been ousted, the investigation is a total bust—and Griselda and Malcolm are stuck watching as their career prospects are washed away by the pounding London rain.
Until the eve of Monochrome’s shuttering, when an MI5 case file appears without explanation. It is the buried history of a classified operation in 1994 Berlin—an operation that ended in tragedy and scandal, whose cover-up has rewritten thirty years of Service history. (Synopsis courtesy of Penguin Random House)
The poor man has lived with the lazy comparisons to Le Carre, the even less accurate Fleming associations and, from the more learned spy fans, Len Deighton references ever since ‘Slow Horses’ really caught fire around 6/7 years ago.
In short, if not an unbroken line of amassing ever-greater garlands, as close as any writer working in the field today.
And, of course, that means that each book becomes a higher wire act as bad actors (geddit?) wait for the fall. I noticed with Herron’s last book that there were one or two snotty reviews in certain publications, as the pendulum continues its full movement towards a back lash.
In fact, I wondered to what extent Herron’s decision to move this novel out of the Slough House milieu was a pre-emptive way of circumventing that entire conversation.
Or, perhaps, it was fab service? Amongst the learned literati of the Spybrary community (nicest place on the internet, best espionage books podcast I’ve ever encountered) there has long been talk of a desire to see Herron tackle a Cold War-set story. This desire seemed settled when the short story, ‘Standing by the Wall’ was released.
And then we heard that a standalone novel was to be released.
And, I’m delighted to report, the shimmering sceptres of lesser writer’s jealousies are going to have to wait a while longer for their enjoyment of the fall.
Because it’s too good. ‘The Secret Hours’ has got it all. It has the needle sharp observations on contemporary British politics, it has the Herron characters we’ve come to expect (fully rounded in that they’re broken on all sides) and it has the exactitude of language which means that no one turns a sentence to effect better – or uses the ambiguity of the English language to better plot effect. It also has the jokes – Apple TV gets a nod here, Gary Oldman there – which implies at least that all this praise has not gone to his head at least.
It is fair to say it is not really a standalone. It’s really an expansion of the “Herronverse”, taking the themes and events encountered in other pieces from the series and then re-visited from the angle of these new characters’ perspectives.
Basically: it’s a joy. It’s clearly Herron’s world; we just live in it. Long may it continue…
Author Bio
Mick Herron is a bestselling and award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for his Slough House thrillers. The series has been adapted into a TV series starring Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb.
Raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, Herron studied English Literature at Oxford, where he continues to live. After some years writing poetry, he turned to fiction, and – despite a daily commute into London, where he worked as a sub editor – found time to write about 350 words a day. His first novel, Down Cemetery Road, was published in 2003. This was the start of Herron’s Zoë Boehm series, set in Oxford and featuring detective Zoë Boehm and civilian Sarah Tucker. The other books in the series are The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers, set in his native Newcastle. During the same period he wrote a number of short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
In 2008, inspired by world events, Mick began writing the Slough House series, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the mainstream for various offences. The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010. Some years later, it was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of “the twenty greatest spy novels of all time”.
The Slough House novels have been published in 20 languages; have won both the CWA Steel and Gold daggers; have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year four times; and have won Denmark’s Palle Rosenkrantz prize. Mick is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Reconstruction, This is What Happened and Nobody Walks. (Biography courtesy of https://www.mickherron.com/landing-page/mick-herron-about)
Jude Lyon of MI6 has narrowly foiled the traitor Fowle’s plot to level London, but the public are demanding answers.
Answers the government doesn’t have.
As the country reels, a new populist political figure carves a stratospheric trajectory – but is he all he seems?
In Moscow the President is furious. The world now knows the destructive power of the programme his people had been developing, and as the Russians scramble to understand how it got into Fowle’s hands, they start to worry that perhaps it could be used against them . . .
But Jude Lyon has just one question on his mind: Guy Fowle is missing, with nothing left to lose,
So what is he planning next?
Seething with political machinations, burning with blood-thumping action, and featuring the best returning MI6 operative since James Bond ‘The Survivor’ brings the espionage novel crashing into the modern day.
Shane Whaley, the legendary host of the Spybrary podcast and it’s associated Facebook group (excellent for fans of Spy Writing, appalling for the bank balance), often says he wishes that he had been alive in the time when many of the giants of the spy fiction world were publishing books.
I can’t help being delighted that we are alive in such a time as now. Mick Herron and Simon Conway are two writers destined to be remembered as first level writers of excellence in the genre. With ‘The Survivor’, Conway cements his position at the summit.
Greater experts than I concur. The Sunday Times’ Tim Shipman – he of the impeccable contacts book and the planet-sized intellect – ranks Conway at 26 in his list of the 120 all time spy writers. Although this seems low, Shipman suggests that, “if he gets the support he deserves from publishers, the sky is the limit,” and this seems about right.
When I reviewed Conway’s previous outing in the series, ‘The Saboteur’, I said, “There is also more crash, bang, wallop than in the first… Conway’s background allows him to write about the violence with predictably bone-jarring verisimilitude but – and perhaps more importantly from a character development and depth of reading enjoyment point of view – is equally strong on the aftermath of terrible acts on people forced to endure unimaginable suffering.”
This blending of the sickening after effects of violence on individuals with the clock ticking tension is once again here in full force as Lyon travels the globe hunting Fowle and attempting to get ahead of the ying to his yang at the same time as a new Prime Minister tries to stamp his authority on a financially and emotionally ravaged country.
Just as well it is fiction, eh?
With an expanded cast of characters and displaying his usual behind the scenes insights into the personalities, petty jealousies and shifting sands of loyalties and politicking within the espionage community, Conway has rendered a must read adventure.
Packed with excitement, exotic locations and the down-to-earth crunch of bone on bone, Conway truly is the heir apparent to Ian Fleming. Not in the cinematic Bond who is too debonair but in the literary Fleming where lives are seldom taken with a quip and bruises take whole books to heal.
‘The Survivor’ is, apparently, the concluding outing in the trilogy. I can only hope that – as Le Carre did with Smiley – there is at least one further outing for the Lyon of the urban jungle.
PAJ Newman 