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Showing posts with label Slow Horses series. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Slow Horses series. Show all posts
Anthony McIntyre ðŸ”– The title is a giveaway. 


It is either about spirits or spies, entities that in unsolicited fashion haunt or hunt others, often without reciprocation. Add the name Mick Herron and instantly the reader familiar with Slough House knows this book belongs to the espionage genre.

Slow Horses are by no means safe horses. The Spook Street course is a fence-strewn one where there are fallers, characters permanently removed, leaving the empathetic reader to mourn their departure. That is what the world of the novel does. The reader can in real life find the type portrayed as anathema, but fiction offers an escape route from the rigours of life actually lived. In the Herron novel British spooks find themselves transformed from obnoxious villains to likeable rogues. The revolutionary purist might raise the alarm at that, insisting that novels are ideological constructs and should be avoided in favour of The German Ideology so that the reader might better understand their true self and the real relationship between that self and the world. Our illusions will be stripped away, and the truth revealed. Praise Lenin. It only takes one good book, even if handed to you by a feckless and fickle functionary already recruited by the spooks, to achieve that. As good a reason as any for not wanting to sit beside either a ban-again revolutionary or a born-again Christian on a train. Amen Jesus. Pass it onto the next unsuspecting victim. I am vouched for, bought and sold by the novel and its offer to the mind of unlimited space.

Slow Horses novels are deliciously irreverent, a tried and tested mockery method that brings a quiver to the famed British stiff upper lip while causing a ripple of indignation to weave its way across the old boy network. While the characters in Fuck Up Central can be likeable, move outside the dank confines of Slough House towards the Park and it is painfully clear that the creatures inhabiting Park life show no sign of those endearing features that caress even the jaundiced reader into letting go of their hostility for the duration of the book.

The fifth in the series, if one novella is counted, Spook Street opens with a bang, a very loud one. A bomber self explodes in a shopping centre where a large group of young people have converged to perform a flash dance. Easy enough to imagine against a background of attacks on musical festivals whether at Bataclan or Manchester Arena. The potential for multiple targets offering lots of blood from those sacrificed is the draw. The person administering the bomb-sting invariably poisons and never pollinates the life alighted on.

Away from that scene, a house intruder is shot dead by David Cartwright, father and mentor of River. Aka the Old Bastard, a man renowned throughout the spook service, Cartwright senior is on the decline mentally. Joe Biden could have acted the part perfectly in the televised adaptation. The face of the intruder is destroyed, which seems a very convenient way of assigning a false identity to the deceased, about which the reader is left to wonder.

There is always a plot that begins to unfold as well as unravel. A staple feature of the spy novel. This plot has a gallic provenance, so the scene for a time moves from the grey streets of London urbanus to the more rustic French countryside. Shades of Ira Levin's Boys From Brazil do not contaminate the air of Spook Street. The French connection somehow led to the destroyed face in David Cartwright's bathroom.

Catherine Standish despite having resigned from the service has not lost her place on stage, managing to remain one of the main characters. With horses falling at each fence, the sense prevails that Standish is a survivor who will complete the course. Despite many challenges - some from Lamb shoving a whiskey glass beneath her nose because he knows she is a recovering alcoholic - she remains a compassionate and straight-shooting perfumed foil to Lamb's permanent state of unwashed cynicism. Her patience when dealing with the Old Bastard runs counter to Lamb who more like a wolf than his name suggests is content to ravish Cartwright until he gets to the bottom of mistakes made many decades earlier but which have exploded to death among multiple young dancers.

Bad Sam Chapman, one time head dog  . . . what was all that about?
 
Mick Herron, 2017, Spook Street. ‎ Baskerville ASIN: B01KXPVEJW.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Spook Street

Anthony McIntyre ðŸ”–Having picked this up whilst watching all 50 episodes of the French espionage drama, Le Bureau des Légendes, there was little to be done to get into the mood for a spy novel.


If nobody does crime drama like the Scandinavians, then nobody does espionage like the French. The Bureau is arguably the best espionage drama ever produced. Primus Inter Pares, it is a hard act to follow, but Mick Herron writes in such an appealing style that the lane switch required is made with the minimum of discomfort.

Those reputed to be the premier spy agencies in the world can be blindsided. Just think Israel this weekend when caught unaware by a Palestinian counter terrorist strike. Even Slough House with its collective of fuck-ups would be hard pressed to fall asleep in the sentry box for so long.

Catherine Standish is kidnapped. River Cartwright makes an unorthodox solo run to secure her release, opening himself up to accusations of betrayal from the Dogs eager to take down a cat, life by life. Not the Animal Farm canines but pigs of the same sow. Calamity descends. They may be Slow Horses but they are old horses and know the course second to none.

Jackson Lamb, is, well, Jackson Lamb, cunning and far sighted as well as vulgar. The Slow Horses take off on a gallop to crack this one. The crack of the whip to get this lot bolting out of the traps comes from the buttocks of Lamb whose irreverent attitude was summed up in his characterising of an adversary as having a mind of a razor – disposable.

Standish is a recovering alcoholic. While in captivity, lunch arrives, served up with a small bottle of wine, which after a while looks irresistible. One glass should do no harm but once she falls off the wagon she will lie by the side of the road, maybe never to be picked up and dusted down again. If she succumbs her last ride on a Slow Horse will be in Real Tigers, ever after remembered as a Joe who was dismissed with ignominy. Can she hold out against everything but temptation? 

Standish is not the only horse with vet defying addiction issues. Marcus Longridge and Shirley Dander are slaves to cocaine or gambling. Their bullying of of Rodney Ho – who in spite of his superciliousness is quite an effective operative – does little to endear them to the reader. How any of them manage to pass vetting to begin with . . .
 
Dame Ingrid Tearney and Diana Taverner can’t stand each other and their endless game of one-upmanship is played out on a spook chess board where there seem to be more dark knights than the rules allow for.  It is observed of Taverner that if ever ‘she self-destructed, she’d find a way of doing so to her own advantage.’

These are some of the characters and their travails that Mick Herron draws together in his irreverent series of novels and novellas. A persistent theme is the fly in the secrets ointment: 'the more secret something needed to be, the more arse covering was necessary for when it leaked.’ And Home Secretary Tony Judd is determined to cover his own arse while groping that of any female who crosses his path, prompting Herron’s contempt for the class chauvinism that governs: 

his tone had that same puncturable quality you heard when government ministers dripping with inherited wealth lectured the nation on the culture of entitlement.

Central to the plot was a body of paperwork colloquially referred to as 'the whackjob files.' Not necessarily religious maniacs but a net much more expansive that aims to trap all those who subscribe to some conspiracy theory:

Downing Street’’ run by lizards, the Royal Family are aliens, UFOs visit regularly, and the Soviet Union never collapsed and has been running the world since ‘89’ . . . with the internet you can have a paranoid fantasy at breakfast and a cut following by teatime.

Tugging the tiger's tale can have fatal consequences, and Herron is not afraid to pronounce life extinct when the reader least expects it. 

Mick Herron, 2017, Real Tigers. Published by John Murray. ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1473674202.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Real Tigers

Anthony McIntyre ðŸ”– Dieter Hess, an old East German asset is found dead in his St Albans flat.


Old spies too must die of natural causes, so no particular cause for alarm. Then a quick search - obligatory when spooks pop their clogs - of his flat uncovers a list of names, hidden beneath a carpet. To make matters worse a secret bank account turns up. 

Nothing is going to draw suspicion towards a spy more than a secret bank account. Establishing whether Hess was or was not compromised is the task that falls into the lap of John Bachelor. 

This is the theme driving the novella, described as 2.5 in the Slough House series rather than 3. It should have been the third. Although much shorter, it is as good as what preceded it and could have been spared the awkward classification.

John Bachelor would prefer to be supping a pint in the spook local in Great Portland Street than digging into the life of Hess. Whatever pitfalls might accrue from his drinking they seem much easier to deal with - buy more beer - than the fate that awaits him should it turn out that Hess was a double agent on Bachelor's watch. His nemesis here on this track none other than Diana Taverner, an old sparring partner to Jackson Lamb. Known as Lady Di - but always behind her back and more for her conceit than any resemblance to the British royal from whom the name was taken - she has the balls of Bachelor in her grip and is not easing on the pressure. 

Her admonishment to him: make sure they don’t have bank accounts they’re not telling us about. You want to take a guess as to why that’s so important?

Bachelor didn't have to guess, but feared that it was a guess that could make him a guest to a world outside of that inhabited by the Spooks. Just an easy time was all he craved but with no chance of success under the baleful glare of Lady Di. He needed the job because his divorce had "cleaned him out." No bare minimum couple of grand that was a necessary part of any escape kit. Fuck Dieter Hess anyway. Bachelor had "gone to find proof of Dieter's innocence. What he had in his pocket proved to be the bastard's guilt."

But things are never quite so straightforward in Spook world. 

Jackson Lamb might have a home and a family but it didn't seem that way given the amount of time he spent lounging about his office. More chance of finding intelligent life on Twitter than Lamb in a family home thought Catherine Standish. Lamb certainly hated traitors but he had a narrow bandwidth for the type and did not include assets in it. Where did Hess fit in? Lamb's mind works overtime although he makes it look leisurely. The permutations do not compute easily in this hall of smoke and mirrors. Lamb with a delicate whiskey performing act assures his listeners that he is even more accomplished than the current James Bond. All part of the character building that Mick Herron accomplishes so well. 

Thus, Molly Doran, an old friend of Lamb's from back in the day, pushes herself into poll position. Confined to a wheelchair, her ability is not. The spook archivist, she is queen in her own castle. She ran a whole floor, it was whispered; ran it like a dragon runs its lair. 

Saddle up a slow horse and enter the world of Slough House.

Mick Herron, 2016, The List. Soho. ISBN-13: 978-1616957452


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The List

Anthony McIntyre ðŸ”–Slough House is not where old spies go to die, although occasionally that is the fate that awaits them. 

A “spooks’ equivalent of Devil’s Island”, useless spies go there. More accurately, those pigeonholed as useless end up there to scoop mercury with a fork until, it is hoped, tedium trumps their desire to go on, and they eventually collapse in a heap in the doorway of the nearest dole office. This enables the cynicism of the spook establishment to trundle on undisturbed by unwanted agencies such as employment tribunals poking their nose in places inhabited by protected species.

Sack the useless, and they took you to tribunal for discriminating against useless people. So the Service bunged the useless into some god forsaken annex and threw paperwork at them, an administrative harassment intended to make them hand in their cards.

Those savvy enough to play their cards rather than hand them in need to be old dogs for the hard road. At their head, the redoubtable Jackson Lamb. The determination of the users to oust the useless is met with fierce resistance fueled by career addiction. Hard for a spook to see the writing on the wall when their job as a spy depends on them not seeing it, as the Upton Sinclair quip goes. And so each rung of the career ladder, even the lowermost, is gripped with the tenacity exhibited by a shipwrecked sailor holding on to whatever debris might keep him afloat.  

My mother always insisted on befriending the characters in novels, so it is probably a trait picked up from her. What I loved when reading the Sven Hassel war series as an imprisoned teenager five decades ago, was accompanying the main players as they fought their way from one theatre of war to the next. Slough House characters, too, serve in their own penal battalion. Staying with them keeps the journey riveting. River Cartwright is back with Jackson Lamb and the team. Just as it was almost fifty years ago with Tiny and Porta. Then there is Spider Webb, a nemesis of Cartwright from the opening book, Slow Horses. An oleaginous slimeball to break even my mother’s empathy with characters.

Another type of denizen of the dark it is impossible to befriend is the reptilian agent of influence. Seems they are a universal phenomenon that leech onto the body they are ostensibly part of, which they go on to bleed dry. Having proved to their paymasters their biddability, pliability is the state they seek to reduce their host to, influence their method.  

They were agents of influence. They were bright talented people, with access to people with access, and they reached right into the heart of the establishment.

There is a bald ring of familiarity about the type. 

A dead spy, his body discovered on a bus close to Oxford – a city whose university was the starting point for many a career in espionage - even had it not being suspicious it would have been viewed by the suspicious minds of spies as being suspicious anyway. A seeming heart attack but . . . Lamb, never to be led to the slaughter, thinks to himself that Dickie Bow has been murdered. Lamb knew Bow from the day when both had been Cold War warriors trudging the streets of Berlin. While there may not have been much Lamb seemed to care about, he did regard joes in the field with something that might be described as fondness. That would not have inhibited his farting when speaking of them. Better out than in as he said, but then maybe not. 

The inquest findings did not surprise him, probably a veteran author of too many contrived coroner’s reports to trust them. Alexander Popov, who features in the book is not to be confused by the inattentive reader with Stefan Popper when it comes to thinking of dodgy coroners. But that is another story which might confuse if persisted with.

With Popov, enter the Russians – these days they always do. If not poisoning adversaries at Salisbury they might be using public transport as a form of hearse.

This is a game of cat and mouse although not in the way a a reader might expect. Herron makes great use of the imagery to take readers on a tour of Slough House, the stable of the Slow Horses. The cat in particular, moves like a rumour!

Humorous and profane, when the Slow Horses gallop, the reader is reminded: "when Lions yawn, it doesn't mean they're tired. It means they're waking up."

Mike Herron, 2013, Dead Lions. Soho Press. ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1616952259.

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Dead Lions

Anthony McIntyre ✒ Late yesterday evening, on my way home from Dublin, thirst well quenched by beer and whiskey, I rang my wife. 


My request was simple – that she have episode 3 of Slow Horses ready to go as soon as I reached home. To my dismay, she told me it would be a further week before it is broadcast. Not the worst news in the world . . . but still. 

Having watched the first two episodes, we are hooked. It was not love at first sight - there had been a lead in: we both had read the novel from which the TV adaptation has been adroitly extricated. The first in a sequence of books, it was clear in a world of espionage - where everything is opaque - that Mick Herron would remain in his Slow Horse saddle for a long time.

Slow Horses is the name given to the denizens of Slough House. It is a sort of back table for wayward spooks, to which they are banished by more senior toffs against terrorism in the hope that they might resign or more crudely, as the vulgar station head might put it, fuck off. It was a “way of losing people without having to get rid of them, sidestepping legal hassle and tribunal threats.”

For a time in the 1970s the back table was used in Crumlin Road Jail for those republicans, due to some perceived failing, considered unfit to dine with the wider cohort. Republicans would frequently complain about the brutality in RUC interrogations centres. Yet, when those churned out the other end -  bruised, demoralised and broken, facing long sentences in prison with the rigours of the blanket protest looming large - arrived in the Crum they suffered the indignity of learning that they were the children of a lesser republican god. Purgatory for them, where they could atone for the sin of breaking, often under torture.

It summed up the first rule of power expressed in Ozark: those who can, shit on the rest; those who can’t, clean it up. The operatives of MI5 too were reassured that to own their rear there were colleagues they could crap on. Slough House means “not being needed.”

We are never sure why Jackson Lamb has ended up in Slough House. He is the prime mover, shaker, stallion in chief in his dingy stable. His redoubtable talents would surely be in demand elsewhere. Although Slough House was not supposed to run operations, that it did just that when called upon might help explain not so much how he arrived but how he became the primus inter pares when he did. Lamb was not some keyboard commando but had risked life and limb as a “Joe” in the field.

Lamb is more of a wolf than anything else, but his cynicism and vulgarity blend to make him the stand out character. He should be obnoxious, but the reader is drawn to him, even if holding their nose. He is brilliantly played by Gary Oldman in the screen version. The character, whether on screen or page is anything but Oldman’s George Smiley. Lamb might be a slob, but he is no slouch.

The chaos within the intelligence agencies invites wonder as to how anything ever gets done. The spooks hate each other. They have an incurable penchant for deviousness and shafting colleagues. Their own familiarity with and proximity to treachery, where internal betrayal for career advantage and office positioning is the first commandment, leaves them like birds in a garden who before each bite scan the terrain for danger to themselves. They are perhaps best placed to spot treachery, so eager to protect themselves against it as retaliation for their own.

So many have been sent to Slough House that there are enough of them to make a line up to equal any Aintree Grand National on starter’s orders. Amongst them, Catherine Standish for whom alcohol had moved from being a solution to a problem. Lamb has a tendency to pour a glass of whiskey when she enters his office, although his gas rather than his glass is likely to be the first intruder in her nostrils.  There are other characters with a different pedigree and who inhabit a more upmarket kennel than Slough House. The sleazy Spider Webb is a nemesis of River Cartwright. Diane Tavender, Lady Di behind her back, is the archetypical string, nay, noose puller. And then there are the dogs. Their type featured previously in a novel called Animal Farm.

The plot hardly gets out of the stalls before the reader is grabbed, the niceties of preparation dispensed with. Cartwright is deemed to have messed up on an operation at Kings Cross Station, resulting in multiple casualties. Not really the full story but . . . it is his free pass to Slough House.

Cartwright immediately looms large and seems set to be the central character. But that role is not for him. There are ample characters although none big enough to remove the ample girth of Jackson Lamb.

A young stand up comedian is kidnapped, and his snatchers threaten to behead him in an act of exemplary terror. In a race against time the hunt is on to beat the chop. The far right makes an appearance as does a sinister side of journalism. A politician, likened elsewhere to Boris Johnson, too has a gig. 

In part the reins pulling on the slow horses are made up from threads of black humour and unpredictability. Even for the reader who is not all that enamoured to the espionage genre, they will find a flutter on the Slow Horses of Slough House, the beginning of a winning run.

Mick Herron, 2010. Slow Horses. ISIS. ISBN-13: ‎978-0753186947

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Slow Horses

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