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As entertaining and brilliant as the Slough House series with Jackson Lamb and his crew might be, as changeable as the unfortunate personnel might be when one or another gets knocked off in this dangerous world of spying, Mick Herron's side-related standalone works often enlarge the scope in a thrilling way. The Secret Hours is not billed as a Slough House book then, but that's in name only. It still operates in the same world of spooks, with more of a focus on the Regent's Park, the headquarters of the Secret Service, and there are quite a few familiar faces appearing - often when you least expect. It's also a world that is not so far removed from our own absurd world, in that questionable area where politics and intelligence services collide. Collide is exactly what they all do when a certain PM with liquidity problems and a casual attitude towards the truth, perhaps guided or encouraged by his repugnant special advisor, 'head gnome' Andrew Sparrow, has sugg...

You've got to hand it to Mick Herron. It can't be easy trying to satirise UK government when there have been three PMs in the position since the last book only a year ago. Another way of looking at it is that the Slough House author is spoiled for choice, but without making him a main player (or bad actor), he sticks with the one resembling the self-interested buffoon who " preferred the public to believe that his ineffectual blustering was a stage act ', probably still the incumbent at the time of writing actually. You know, the one with a self-important dodgy SPAD enforcer and disruptor (" gnome-in-residence ") running the show and doing his best to break down the established order of the service. He's up against some stiff if unwitting competition in Herron's world with the crew at Slough House. One of the targets of the PM's Special Advisor Anthony Sparrow is someone with possibly more power and influence than himself, or perhaps he just like...

Books of the Year 2020 Like any personal best of list, the selections are inevitably limited by what one was able to have the time to read, watch or listen to, and it can in no way be definitive or comprehensive reflection of what was the best out there. As far as books go, there are plenty of literary awards with panels to choose from a wider selection, but for a single reader, the time invested means that you tend to stick with genres you are familiar with and writers who never let you down. Occasionally however, books come your way that are a delightful surprise precisely because you weren't expecting it. This year I read and reviewed 72 books for various places, of which 49 were English language novels, 6 were in French, 2 were in Spanish and 15 were graphic novels. My favourite 5 books (and one graphic novel) consequently consist of three favourite writers who didn't disappoint this year and two authors new to me in the literary genre that I wasn't expecting to impress...

Slough House gets title billing in the seventh book of Mick Herron’s Slough House series, and with good reason, as Slough House, the nondescript building close to the Barbican in the East of London that is currently occupied by the dregs, failures and misfits of the British Intelligence Device, has been wiped from the map. Not literally, although the kill rate there seems to be higher than the average – Darwin’s Law in action – but rather wiped, deleted and expunged from the service records. It’s as if it didn’t exist, which of course officially it doesn’t. Something is going down however and it’s not going to be good for the physically and odorously repulsive but seemingly invulnerable Jackson Lamb and his crew of ‘slow horses’. It’s become difficult for writers to satirise UK and world politics these days when the government do a much better job of it themselves, and I thought the world was one step up the absurd ladder ahead of Herron in his last few Slough House books ( London R...

Billed as ‘a Slough House novella’ (what happened to the ‘Jackson Lamb’ series?), The Drop doesn’t feature any of the regular Slough House crew, but it does introduce a few other bottom of the heap and dumped-upon minor operatives for the British Intelligence who are about to discover what happens when you upset Lady Di Taverner and start poking around in corners where you’ve no business being. John Bachelor’s only valuable contribution is that he has recruited an agent from the BND – Bundesnachrichtendienst – German Intelligence, although she might not be aware that she is officially an agent or may actually be a double agent. Or even a triple agent in that very left-hand not knowing the right hand way of intelligence services in these “friendly nation” times that Herron has been exploiting to tremendous effect in his Jackson Lamb novels. Bringing real world stupidity into the supposed prestige world of authorities like the national Intelligence services is however something that we...

The omens aren’t good for the unfortunate staff consigned to the scrapheap of the intelligence service in Slough House. Mick Herron traditionally starts his Jackson Lamb novels with a poetic image such as a ray of light briefly illuminating the gloomy interior of the dank building they inhabit or a cat wandering through the building, both imaginary since neither light nor sentient creature would willingly go near the place. The opening image of Joe Country is a burning owl escaping from a blazing barn falling to the ground in a clump of ashes - for real rather this time rather than as a poetic metaphor - sets the tone for what is to come. Joe Country shows us another place that MI5 operatives visit but none ever leave. Death. Not that the inhabitants of Slough House are unfamiliar with deaths in their ranks, and at least one of them has actually sort of come back from the dead – cheating death being a useful trick to have up your sleeve in the spy trade. No, the shadow of death in th...

Consigned to Slough House, the dumping ground for the British Intelligence service, the intention is to keep those agents who have screwed up in the past out of harm's way. And yet, Jackson Lamb's sorry little unit can't seem to keep out of trouble. Even more improbably in Dead Lions , someone back at headquarter in Regents Park has decided to involve them in an operation, taking them away from their tedious administrative tasks and actually set them loose in the field. You'd think that Min Harper and Louisa Guy might be just a bit suspicious, particularly as their previous dealings have shown that James 'Spider' Webb is not someone to be trusted, but an op is an op, and it beats rotting away doing mundane time-wasting tasks in Slough House. All Webb wants is for them to 'vet' and look out for a Russian Oligarch and oil businessman Arkady Pashkin, who is due to visit London. Webb has his own reasons for the meeting, and by involving Slough House he obvio...

Mick Herron, as we know by now from the elaborately labyrinthine twists of his wonderfully amusing accounts of the intelligence services in the Jackson Lamb/Slough House series, does the whole secrets thing well. And characters who have secrets. And characters who want desperately to keep those secrets hidden, so desperately, they’re prepared to take desperate measures to keep them hidden. This is What Happened is also about secrets and desperate measures but it’s on a difference register and with a different focus from Herron’s spook novels. Not that you would immediately recognise this, as the novel – a standalone work outside of the author’s regular series – starts out with a young woman, Maggie Barnes, who is involved in a top secret espionage operation. Maggie is just an ordinary person, working in the mailroom of Quilp House, but she’s been recruited by an MI5 agent, Harvey Wells, to keep an eye open for any irregular activity, as ‘Five’ have suspicions about the building being...

Mick Herron's first entry into the Jackson Lamb/Slough House series is in some aspects a little more low-key compared to how it later develops and is quite slow to get started, but already many of the character traits and the dry sardonic look at the British Intelligence Services is very much in place in Slow Horses . Having said that, after it has taken some time to establish the nature of the dumping ground for failed spooks that is Slough House however, and the types of characters consigned there through incompetence, bad luck and well, personality problems. There is nothing low-key either about an MI5 undercover operation that goes badly wrong, and plenty of action and drama that results in a number of casualties among the ranks of the slow horses. As far as the operation goes, well it's still relevant today even if the post-9/11 world of terrorist activities has moved on and expanded considerably beyond this. A young man has been abducted, put in an orange jumpsuit and ho...

“ Recent years had seen a recalibration of political lunacy “, Mick Herron observes quite early on in London Rules and, watching our political leaders on the TV News most nights, you’d begin to worry that, like political satire elsewhere, Herron’s Jackson Lamb/Slough House series might lose something of an edge in what has up to now managed to be both uproariously funny and deadly serious. In the real world, the balance hasn’t always been quite as favourable. Mick Herron then has no option but to introduce a few more lunatics into London Rules in addition to the cognitively challenged crew in the dump heap of the Secret Service in Slough House. They however all have good reasons why they’ve ended up monitoring library records across the country for anyone reading “extremist literature” or cross-checking electoral rolls against properties as an unlikely way of listing potential terrorist safe houses; incompetence, personality failings and various addictions. While not valued in the S...

Whose turn is it this time? You can always be sure that one of Jackson Lamb's team of bottom of the rung intelligence agents is going to get put through the wringer, tortured and beaten up pretty badly, or worse, take a bullet.  As it happens, one of the regular 'slow horses' in the Slough House team gets whacked in Spook Street , permanently. Sorry for being blunt about it, but well, it goes with the territory, and there will always be plenty of other candidates to take their place in the secret service's dumping ground. Slough House is where the intelligence services demote those agents who need to be quietly 'let go', some of them having done time in the field and messed up really badly, others who will never be let anywhere near it. Since they can't be trusted to go back into normal society either, exile to Slough House means spending the rest of their days wading through reams of data to ensure that they never forget just how worthless they are. There...

Welcome to the shadowy nether regions of the British secret service. No, not the high-flying, glamorous licenced to kill types, but rather the drones who do all the basic administration, cataloguing, storing, retrieving and crunching data. There's low and there's low however and if you're a 'slow horse' working in Slough House, as you might know from Mick Herron's previous two novels in the Slough House series , your career has taken a turn for the worst and is unlikely to see any improvement. Can't be the most exciting job to have in MI5, you'd think, but you'd be surprised how dangerous office politics can be in such a place. Misfits, losers, recovering alcoholics, agents whose operations have taken an unfortunate turn of events that they haven't recovered from; all of them seem to end up in Slough House. But they are still intelligence and they aren't stupid, even if they act like it sometimes. Take Catherine Standish for instance in Real ...