Disordered Shelves : Slow Horses by Mick Herron (2010)
Mick Herron’s Dead Lions, featuring the same characters and downbeat milieu as Slow Horses, won the CWA Gold Dagger for 2013. I found the preceding novel to be very impressive. The ‘Slow Horses’ are the B-Team of MI5, exiled out of the mainstream of the service for misdemeanours of varying degrees - be it crashing Kings Cross during a terrorist training exercise by tackling an innocent bystander, or sleeping with a diplomat’s wife, or killing another agent in the line of duty. Why ‘Slow Horses’? Because the team operate out of Slough House, with its front door that “ lurks in a dusty recess between commercial premises in the Borough of Finsbury, a stone’s throw from Barbican Station.” The service equivalent of Siberia, in other words.
Mick Herron sets up an entertainingly credible world of inter-department rivalry, “Achievers” and “Dogs” versus Slough House’s island of misfit toys, with both outfits trying to prevent the live-on-the-web execution of a Muslim student kidnapped by far right terrorists. A liaison meeting at Westminster between spooks and politicos is “a cross between an Oxbridge MCR and a railway platform : a collection of chinless wonders, with a sprinkling of hardened veterans”. Slough House is headed up by Jackson Lamb, Herron’s most vivid creation, a rumpled, rude, robust puppetmaster who I can imagine the late Richard Griffiths playing to perfection.
Herron knows how to escalate the tension - and disposes of some well drawn players in his drama in classic Spooks fashion - and the only jarring note is the introduction of Peter Judd, “fluffy haired and youthful at forty eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations - Balderdash! Tommyrot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!!.... the unthreatening face of the old school right, popular enough with the GBP, which thought him an amiable idiot… a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle. “ I look forward to finding out if he’s Prime Minister in Dead Lions.
Mick Herron sets up an entertainingly credible world of inter-department rivalry, “Achievers” and “Dogs” versus Slough House’s island of misfit toys, with both outfits trying to prevent the live-on-the-web execution of a Muslim student kidnapped by far right terrorists. A liaison meeting at Westminster between spooks and politicos is “a cross between an Oxbridge MCR and a railway platform : a collection of chinless wonders, with a sprinkling of hardened veterans”. Slough House is headed up by Jackson Lamb, Herron’s most vivid creation, a rumpled, rude, robust puppetmaster who I can imagine the late Richard Griffiths playing to perfection.
Herron knows how to escalate the tension - and disposes of some well drawn players in his drama in classic Spooks fashion - and the only jarring note is the introduction of Peter Judd, “fluffy haired and youthful at forty eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations - Balderdash! Tommyrot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!!.... the unthreatening face of the old school right, popular enough with the GBP, which thought him an amiable idiot… a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle. “ I look forward to finding out if he’s Prime Minister in Dead Lions.