Contains very mild spoilers
What did Jackson Lamb do in Berlin? The more we’ve see just how damaged Lamb has become from his time in the secret service, the more we’ve wondered. It was unlikely that we’d find out within the standard Slough House/Slow Horses series but in the short story The Last Dead Letter Mick Herron gives us cold war Lamb, reheated as it were by Molly Doran’s curiosity.
Doran has called Lamb to a meeting in St Len’s, Hampstead, also known as the Spooks’ Chapel. She has the details of a case but wants to know from Lamb how it ends. She tells the story and Lamb fills in some of the gaps. It’s an extraordinary format, really, and seems to have been deployed to enable Herron to tell a Cold War story on his own terms: without giving us insight into Lamb’s inner thought processes either in West Berlin or North London.
All we know at first about protagonist Dominic Cross is that he had a number of names and identities. Might he be Lamb? There’s a clue that he might not be: Herron uses his usual technique of free indirect speech to explore Cross’s thoughts. We get to see David Cartwright in action, too, as the OB interviews Cross when the spook is in London.
Spy tradecraft has moved on since the Cold War, we assume, and Herron gives us some new concepts to consider, such as the mirror man. By the end – and once Lamb’s character and involvement are explained – we are a little closer to understanding how much of Jackson Lamb was built in Berlin and how much preceded even that.
This short story has been published in a number of places. In the UK it was included in some editions of London Rules, and in the USA in a special anniversary edition of Slow Horses. It’s currently available in the Dolphin Junction anthology. If you’re trying to read everything in order, you should pick it up after Joe Country – but sources differ on whether you should read it before or after the novella The Catch. (I don’t think it matters.) Either way, it’s worth seeking out.
Cafethinking 
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