Spook Street: Slough House Thriller 4

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His deft and sympathetic characterisation affords the reader a connection with the slow horses (the Park’s nickname for their castoffs) which grows with every triumph, every obstacle overcome, and their losses are felt keenly. It is assumed that his grandfather, who rarely leaves the house, has mistaken him for an intruder and killed him. it’s a real pleasure to watch the super-smart if damaged Slough House agents rising to the occasion.

Le Carré’s George Smiley embodied the Cold War-era decline of the British Empire—upright and betrayed, his disposition of quiet, keep-calm-and-carry-on forbearance a proxy for Britain itself. In the books, Mick Herron describes the location of Slough House very precisely – so precisely, in fact, that readers were able to pinpoint the exact location. His slow horses come in every type, and they got kicked out of the service for every imaginable screwup. With the 2022 release of the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses, however, it's come onto the radar of an entirely new set of people – many of them addicted to the twists and turns and delightful subterfuge of London spy life. G. Wodehouse as he does to le Carré; he’s got something of the extremity of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Stilton Cheesewright, and Lord Emsworth.So the Service bunged the useless into some godforsaken annex and threw paperwork at them, an administrative harassment intended to make them hand in their cards. Then he came up with Sarah Tucker, a bored and frustrated out-of-work lawyer living in South Oxford, ambivalent about having children and married to a creep. Catherine would sometimes find him in the morning, sprawled on his chair like a misplaced squid, the air smelling like water from a vase of week-old flowers.

The strength of Spook Street – and doubtless, the entire series – lies in Herron’s characters, and their interrelationships. In spite of their low status within the agency, the agents of Slough House will soon find themselves in the middle of something that threatens not just themselves, but all of MI5.Those in charge quickly figure out the people responsible for the bombing but don’t understand the motive. This novel is a series highlight for me, and went on to win the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award as well as being shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award, The British Book Awards and The Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. It is, in fact, in London, on Aldersgate Street, next to a Chinese takeout and near the Barbican tube station. The central conceit of the books is that MI5, like any large organisation, needs somewhere to place its most hopeless employees, and this place is Slough House, a building just around the corner from the Barbican Centre.