Clown Town
By Mick Herron
Herron’s plot takes off from real-world events: the Stakeknife scandal – in which it turned out that MI5 had been protecting a murderously vicious IRA enforcer as an intelligence asset – appears here in the story of Pitchfork, whose signature “nutting” technique of killing during the Troubles was running over people’s heads.
Pitchfork’s story was covered up – until it wasn’t. His old handlers have come out of the woodwork and, to mix metaphors, the sky soon grows dark with chickens coming home to roost. Herron’s hero River Cartwright (whose late grandfather’s archive, we discover, contained crucial material about Pitchfork) starts pulling on a thread. The Service’s First Desk, the machiavellian Diana Taverner, launches another of her fiendish schemes and is soon once again sparring with the Slow Horses’ profane ringmaster Jackson Lamb.
Over the last decade this series of novels about a community of cashiered spies has made the transition from “well-kept secret” to “household name”. Herron is now an authentic megastar of the genre, and since the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses every reader (and I expect the author) will have recalibrated their mental image of Jackson Lamb from Timothy Spall to Gary Oldman (early novels likened Lamb to Spall “gone to seed”). But the books are still the main event – because it’s Herron’s line-by-line writing that really makes them stand out.
These books are a strange and addictive hybrid. The bones of any Slough House novel are those of a classic spy story: there will be bad actors, buried secrets, hidden agendas, opaque and shifting stratagems and, sooner or later, gunplay or chases or kidnappings or eruptions of semi-competent violence. But the self-seriousness of most spy fiction is not present. The surface fizz is more like a sitcom: the back-and-forth of witty insults and off-colour jokes, sight gags and character work – Herron’s oddball cast chafing against each other while they sit in their shabby office opposite the Barbican, suffering through their make-work day jobs. Sam Leith
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