This is by Mick Herron. It was first published in 2010, and it's the first in the Slough House series.

Slough House? This is where, Herron tells us, MI5 sends its screw-ups, burn-outs, and anyone else they want to lose without the hassle of legal process. The building is unprepossessing. The work is tedious. The hope is that the "slow horses" who inhabit Slough House will get bored, and resign of their own accord.

Why "Slough"? The following bit of dialogue explains:

-- Lamb's been banished.
-- Where've they sent him? Somewhere awful?
-- Bad as it gets.
-- God, not Slough?
-- Might as well be.

The site, in the Borough of Finsbury, a stone's throw from Barbican tube station, is real. Mick Herron walked past it every day on his way to work: "A dingy black door squeezed between a questionable restaurant and a dodgy convenience store led to the upstairs floors. You might be able to find more depressing places to work, but this building would certainly make it into the top ten." On the other hand, the area has associations with Orwell, Blake, Defoe, Bunyan... Equipped with the idea and the setting, all Herron needed to make something unforgettable was Jackson Lamb, who heads up Slough House. Initially, everything about this slovenly and devious man is unlikeable. But gradually, you understand there's something about him that even his enemies grudgingly respect. And though he doesn't think much of the cast-aways he's supposed to administer, they're HIS cast-aways, and he'll try to protect them.


Slow Horses was released as a TV adaptation in 2022

I came to this book via that incredibly productive spy books link from The Economist (the one that has already sent me to Secret Asset and Transcription). It actually recommends Dead Lions, but I thought it was best to start at the beginning of the series, a thought endorsed by this espionage list from The Interpreter, which also likes Herron.

Here's a rough run-down of the story (no spoilers). Our group of washed-up spies is suddenly back in the thick of the action when a young British man of Pakistani origins is kidnapped by a far-right group. They threaten to behead him live on the internet, as a reprisal for the suicide attacks on London's transport network in July 2005. The plotters are not quite what they seem, however, and a range of individual motivations -- political, propagandist, and career-enhancing -- are muddying the waters.


I was teaching International Relations at International Pacific College in New Zealand in 2005. The day I woke to hear about the London attacks was, ironically, the day we were due to talk about terrorism in my War and Peace class...

What I liked about Herron's series-opener:

-- Short (but not too short) chapters, with rapidly changing points-of-view and therefore lots of opportunities for cliffhangers, many of which lead you off on false trails: "The author seems to delight in his ability to mess with the readers and the anticipation of what will happen."

-- Real characters. There's a bit of overload at the beginning as you slowly pan round them all. But it's worth it. They feel like real people. I guess it's slightly unfortunate that the super-tech guy (Roderick Ho, who really does make you wonder about how easy it might be for your identity to be stolen...) is Asian by origin. I know he has to be something, but there's a whiff of stereotype about that. River Cartwright, who is clearly going to be Important With a Capital I in the series (grandfather a very senior former spook; mother a free spirit, hence the weird name; opens the book by bungling a test exercise and crashing King's Cross, but suspects he has been set up for reasons not initially known), reminds me extraordinarily of someone I once knew, and didn't totally like... Catherine Standish, pushing 50, and a former alcoholic, is bound to be increasingly interesting, you feel, but we already have a quick snapshot when we're told what one man once said to her: "You're lovely... But you look like you've had some scary moments." Now there's no-one to tell her she's lovely: "The scary moments had won. Which sounded like a definition of ageing, to Catherine. The scary moments had won.")

-- A well-calibrated tone. All the people at Slough House are loners, nursing grudges, and cursing their luck. They are initially at best indifferent to each other, and at worst hostile. And when the chips are down, not all of them coalesce into a working group. But some do, and it's interesting to see this collection of misfits starting to cooperate. Similarly, the sheer terror of the abductee is clearly shown, but without depriving him of agency or personality.

-- Lots of swipes at the idiocy of modern British life. Some examples:

++ On inquiries: "There'd been an inquiry... the upshot of which was, River had made sixteen basic errors inside eight minutes. It was bullshit. It was Health and Safety. It was like when a fire breaks out in the office, and afterwards everyone's ordered to unplug the kettle when it's not in use, even though it wasn't the kettle started the fire in the first place. You couldn't count a plugged-in kettle as an error. Everyone did it. Almost no one ever died... Who'd screwed up didn't matter; who'd been visible during the screw-up did."

++ On meetings: "'I hate to interrupt,' a suit said. The almost audible rolling of multiple pairs of eyes suggested that this wasn't entirely true."

++ On certain politicians: "Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the Great British Public, which thought him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite... Not everyone who'd worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who'd witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he'd either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle... For a moment the real Peter Judd peered out from the overgrown schoolboy, and what he was doing was what he was always doing: weighing up who he was talking to in terms of the threat they posed, and assessing how that threat might cleanly be dealt with. 'Cleanly' meant without repercussion."

++ On everyday life: "Simmonds had made his money in long-haul logistics, what used to be called removals... Curly... did a weekly off-the-books stint as an exit-coordinator at a club, what used to be called bouncing."

++ On spying in today's world: "If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse... London rules were devised in the corridors of Westminster, and the short version read: someone always pays. Make sure it isn't you... [There was] a fundamental difference between suits and joes. When a joe looked at you, if he was any good, you'd never notice. But when a suit turned it on, you could feel their glare scorching holes in your intestinal tract."



What I didn't like:

-- A couple of times, the reader is made aware of the existence of a specific piece of information, but is not then made privy to what it is. I always feel frustrated by what seems like cheating on the author's part. As did this reviewer, who rails again "a device so over-used that one really never wants to come across it again".

*_*_*

Fairly obviously, though, there's much more to like than not to like. I'll be back for more.