A New Generation’s Smiley

Slow Horses by Mick Herron (2010) – Slough House is where MI5 sends you when you’ve made a terrible mistake. The hope is that the residents, called “Slow Horses”, will quit. Days, weeks, and months of grinding out Slough House’s only product, meaningless and ignored paperwork is intended to break them. When a minor domestic terrorist group announces they will behead a young immigrant on a live feed, the current batch of Slow Horses see a chance to win their own freedom. But nothing about this case is as it seems. It will cause more than a single death.

Why I Liked It – This is a proper entry into the category of espionage novel associated with John Le Carre. Well written, beautifully plotted.

This is a new series to me, even though it’s been around for fifteen years. Because I read so widely, it’s easy for books and authors to slip by me. Mick Herron has earned a reputation as a solid writer in the classic espionage genre. Everything happens in dim light. Hope is for the naively optimistic. What happens in front of your eyes is energized behind an infinite number of layers. And what your eyes see is certainly not what is really happening. John Le Carre perfected tales of the soul-destroying work of serving the national interest. Herron works the same turf with skill.

Everyone at Slough House has screwed up and done it at a high level. A misidentification during a bomb threat, being too close to a traitor, or just having sex with the wrong person’s wife, will send you to MI5’s purgatory assignment. Your career has no future. You’ve lost whatever level of professional respect you might have ever had. The only important question left for you is: how long can you survive the mind crushing tedium of doing pointless work that you know is of no interest to anyone?

Curiously, being banished to Slough House is a career saver for River Cartwright. Not because he enjoys the humiliating assignment, but because he wasn’t terminated from the service altogether. Cartwright’s grandfather is a legend in security circles and pulled a few strings to keep Cartwright employed. Now he’s trapped under the direction of the cynical, vulgar Jackson Lamb. Lamb is a legend in his own right, but overplayed his hand and landed on the top floor of Slough House. His view of his punishment is being stuck as the putative leader of this band of incompetents.

The powers that be in the wider world of MI5 are playing games within games. In one of them, a young Pakistani man is kidnapped. His abductors threaten to kill him in a live internet feed. Meanwhile, the Slow Horses are being lined up as the scapegoats for an operation that wasn’t properly authorized. Eventually, the misfit agents will take their fates into their own hands. If they are as incompetent as everyone, including themselves, believes, then the end is coming. But what happens if they succeed?

Herron does a great job pulling all the threads of this story. Add in a twisted sense of humor and you get a new look at the “classic” style of story. I really loved this book. Another author to do a deeper dive on.

Rating – **** Recommended