Recently, something has got between me and the Slough House books. I’ve started wondering what this or that plot point will mean for the TV show. Will casting decisions change the plot? How will it play out on screen? That’s a bad situation to be in, so I suspended reading Clown Town and re-read The Secret Hours instead. I had wondered whether Mick Herron’s stylistic choices would mean Hours was less fun the second time around. Actually, this standalone novel in the Slough House world, if anything, improves with repeated contact.
We should start by clarifying a few things. The jacket of The Secret Hours makes one reference to its own world. There’s a little circle on the front that reminds us that Mick Herron is ‘Author of Slow Horses, Now a Major TV Series’. (I apologise for the awful initial capitals.) Jackson Lamb is not named, though if you spot his character playing a major role I shouldn’t be at all surprised, and on the back page, we are invited to ‘Join Jackson Lamb and his team of misfits’. Meanwhile, Diana Taverner, Molly Doran, David Cartwright, John Bachelor and others make appearances. Not everything is as it seems, which is as a good spy novel should be. (Though if you have read Standing by the Wall, you will be a couple of steps ahead.)
In fact, The Secret Hours sees Herron mix it all up in a way that is both utterly satisfying to Slow Horses aficionados but also the potential new readers that might be fooled by the deception from the marketing team that this world is entirely new. He deals with politics from a slightly different angle, and shows a slightly higher quality of spycraft than the slow horses can possibly deliver. And yet the overarching theme, that dead end jobs are dead end jobs whether or not the consequences of your mistakes involve a body bag, and that the powerful aren’t to be trusted, feels fresher for being delivered in a different way.
So there’s a cat-and-mouse (or cat-and-dead-badger) chase from rural Devon to the streets of Mayfair, a wretched government inquiry set up for vindictive reasons by people who may remind us of former prime minister Johnson and his sidekick Cummings, some actually decent spywork, civil servants whose careers have stalled, and some arch observations about the way in which tech bros aren’t all that different from the gangsters of the Cold War and its aftermath.
Herron’s delivery of all this is as withering as you’d expect, with some acutely funny asides. He gets to try slightly different types of writing such as satirical transcripts from the inquiry (which are a bit too outlandish to land). There are lots of Easter eggs for Slough House fans and also for other works in the genre. I recognised Rogue Male in here but there are shout-outs too to Deighton, le Carré and others. Herron’s very aware of his place in the genre but isn’t above paying homage.
And Herron gets to work on his characters and what drives them, in a way that just isn’t possible in the standard series. For most of the second half of the book is set in early 1990s Berlin. The government inquiry has, after 18 months of drudgery, been leaked its first interesting and useful document. The witness tells the story of an attempt to revenge the murder of a Stasi source. Their handler was a not very well-disguised Jackson Lamb. The Wall has fallen, so Lamb is no longer the active agent that he had been. But two stories previously mentioned in both the books and the TV series come together to explain just how this mid-career Lamb makes certain decisions and reconciles his own mistakes, his moral code and the code of the service. And other characters muse about the paths their lives have taken since history was supposedly ended. One red line isn’t crossed: Jackson Lamb doesn’t muse. Herron’s not bringing down the entire edifice.
If you’re a fan of the Slough House world, you should definitely read this. Do so after Standing by the Wall and before Clown Town, to which, refreshed, I now return.
Cafethinking 