Contains very mild spoilers

If you work for MI5, and John Bachelor comes asking for favours, run for your life. The Drop, published in some countries where the inhabitants can’t pronounce Marylebone as The Marylebone Drop, is the second novella set in the Slough House world: once again Bachelor sets in train events that will have an innocent colleague end up as a slow horse. Author Mick Herron explores entry-level spycraft as performed by people who think they’re better at this game than Jackson Lamb and his troupe of rejects. Problem is, they spend so much time on low-level office politics that they miss several chances to rectify a mistake that’s so old it’s carried forward from the previous novella, The List.

Jackson Lamb, as usual, had been right all along. He doesn’t appear in The Drop, but in the closing pages of The List he mused on Bachelor’s discovery of Hannah Weiss, and concluded that this must have been a set up. And MI5’s German counterparts, the BND, had indeed introduced MI5 to Hannah Weiss, such that when MI5 recruited her as a double agent, she in fact became a triple agent. The BND want Weiss to provide intel on the Brexit negotiations, even though, as Herron puts it, ‘Britain had been handling these discussions with the grace and aplomb of a rabbit hiding a magician in its hat’. Meanwhile, Diana Taverner is using baked goods to win over the head of the Limitations Committee, and her new sidekick is both utterly out of his depth and completely unaware of the fact.

It would be easy to distinguish between the joes on one hand and the handlers and administrators on the other. We always assume that the former have skin in the game while the latter can mess about with their pastries. But it is an analyst who will end up at Slough House, while Weiss, who can’t conceive of the notion that things might go wrong, is having a blast playing a role. Herron rubs it in by imagining that for the eponymous drop a prop department might have been useful. And the world-weary writer reminds us more than is strictly necessary that the whole spy thing is really just a game.

I’m really enjoying the idea of these novella interludes: they allow Herron a chance to flex different writing muscles and explore different corners of the Slough House universe. They aren’t as funny, yet they feel lighter, almost inconsequential until you recall that each includes a funeral and a character sacrificed from normal life to eke out the rest of their days in the purgatory of Slough house itself. And in any case, the first words of The Drop should set you straight: ‘seasoned Park watchers’ have studied the affair. By the last page, Bachelor may think he’s got away with it all for now. But if the consequences of this novella should spill Into further Slough House books, I shouldn’t be at all surprised. 

Check out all Cafethinking reviews of all Slough House novels, novellas and short stories, plus episode reactions to series 5 of Slow Horses.