What with one thing and another, it’s taken several weeks to read Real Tigers, the third in the Slough House series of novels and adapted to be the third series of Apple TV’s Slow Horses, but if I had time I would willingly re-read it straight away. I’ve folded down the corners of 39 pages and page 106 has both corners folded. The TV series felt bleak, even though the darkest moments switch to a comedy cameo from a party bus. But in the novel, Mick Herron’s world-weariness and fury take control of the page, with enough energy to power a small town. It isn’t necessarily the machinations of back-stabbing bureaucrats that has Herron going, but the desperate venality of their ambition.

Speaking of venal. Real Tigers is the novel in which it becomes clear even to this dozy reader that Herron has based the character of Peter Judd on Boris Johnson. Real Tigers was published in January 2016, before the series of Johnson-led national humiliations that would follow, but Herron has his full measure. At a time when the lying narcissist man-baby is flogging his new memoir, Herron gives us an alternative analysis – and one that’s at least well-written to boot.

In Real Tigers, Catherine Standish is kidnapped, and the Slough House team use their best endeavours to get her back. We wonder, again, whether Lamb’s exterior hides a secret affection for his team. There’s proof only that he will never let a joe rot in the field. That’s important, because the slow horses’ best endeavours aren’t very good. They’re all dealing with one form of addiction or another: the opposite of a superpower. Gambling, alcohol, narcotics, behavioural ticks such as a need to be at the centre of activity: all take their toll on our heroes. But our heroes they remain, for they balance their obvious failings with some occasional sparks of spycraft or just plain muscle that mask their default incompetence, and they are too downtrodden to even dream about making decisions to harm others on their own team for their personal advancement.

‘Losers, misfits and boozers’ they may be, but you do wonder: are these really the sum total of the addicts in the Service? Where have all the others gone? More to the point, in whose service is the Service operating? Herron can’t make plainer his disdain for the smallness of the agendas of the so-called Great People – Judd, Tearney and Taverner – all jostling for tiny advantage over each other no matter the body count. 

Page 106 spells it out. Here’s Ingrid Tearney musing:

It used to be simpler. There was the Service, and there were the nation’s enemies. These changed identity every so often, depending on who’d been elected, despised or assassinated, but by and large the boundaries were clear: you spied on your foes, kept tabs on the neutrals, and every so often got a chance to f*** up your friends in a plausibly deniable way. A bit like school, but with fewer rules. Nowadays…geopolitics barely got a look-in.

Here, then, is Herron’s fury. Then, he shakes his shoulder and has Tearney shake hers. Something’s going on in the basement, involving an off-site agent who has infiltrated the Park:

‘And where is he now?’

‘Downstairs. Mr Duffy’s talking to him.’

It was a frequently regretted state of affairs, being talked to by Mr Duffy.

Here is Herron’s world-weariness.

Just to make all this even clearer, we see the effects of grown up high-schooling on two fringe characters: one crosses a moral line (we think he’s aware of the moral line so how does his behaviour compare against the Great People?) and the other is a tragic figure who is created solely to be destroyed but the potential of which was spotted by the TV adaptors.

And speaking of the TV adaptors, they have created not one, but many films. The prequel, which owes nothing to the novel, is an Istanbul-set action sequence that could grace any Bond pre-title opening. (It helps that the slow horses aren’t involved.) The final two episodes are one single action film. Curiously, the lushness of the production merely amplifies the bleakness and barrenness of the machinations of the Greats – fine dining and good whisky are all very well but it’s Donovan and his family who are fighting for their cause and the slow horses who are fighting for their lives. Taverner, Tierney and Judd think nothing of plotting schemes in which, even in their most benign form, would have an innocent-ish participant rotting in prison for a decade, and, as they develop most unbenignly, see Tierney utter the most chilling remark we’ve heard this side of a Bond villain.

Real Tigers is darker than the first two Slough House novels (though of similar tone to Nobody Walks) but it feels like Herron’s just getting into his stride. Can’t wait to find out what happens next.

Our other Slow Horses/Slough House coverage:

Slow Horses

Dead Lions

The List

Nobody Walks

Spook Street

London Rules