Review - The Drop by Mick Herron

The Drop (Slough House)
Mich Herron
John Murray, 1 November 2018
HB, e 104pp

TRANSMISSION BEGINS+++

I received this short report through the usual means (brown envelope through letterdrop, handoff, no contact with operative making drop - although I suspect that originating officer was codename YASSINE - recommend congratulations for excellent work).

Have reviewed contents. File contains extensive background information compiled by operative codename HERRON concerning SLOUGH HOUSE, alleged outstation of REGENT'S PARK to which deprecated operatives are consigned.

Suspect new recruit to SLOUGH HOUSE following events recorded in file LONDON RULES.

Recommend opening new file and close consideration of report at earliest opportunity upon wider distribution, currently scheduled 1 November.

TRANSMISSION ENDS+++

Well. I didn't expect this book, didn't know it was coming out, but I'm SO glad that John Murray sent me a copy.

The Drop is a novella set in the world of Herron's Slough House stories - home to the Security Service's misfits, dropouts and no-hopers (Herron's argument that people like this couldn't just be sacked, and need housed and occupied seems frighteningly plausible).

The book isn't about Slough House itself, or its collection of off-the-boil assets, though its subjects could well belong there - Solomon Dortmund, a retired spook pottering around Marylebone in his decline and ex agent John Bachelor, kept on the payroll to look after those like Dortmund, ensuring they have what they need and don't speak to the wrong people.

The joke is that Bachelor's life is in a spin and he's virtually homeless, resorting to bunking down in the ready room at Regent's Park, HQ of the Service. So when Dortmund thinks he's witnessed a drop and reports it to Bachelor, it's not exactly item number one on Batchelor's to-do list.

In many ways this is a gentle comedy of spy manners, as much about our times as it is about putting one over on the opposition. There is a real agent in play here, actually a double agent, and the way they're being handled shows old alliances shifting, the spooks looking to an uncertain future and trying to get pieces in the game with a very different Europe taking shape.

As intelligence analyst Lech (or Alec) notes "...whereas the general attitude among the boys and girls was that right would ultimately triumph, something in [his] bones sang of doom, or whispered along with the chorus... [he] couldn't entirely suppress the fear that sooner or later... they'd all fail, that their home skies would look down on cataclysm."

Against that doomy background, Herron weaves his normal spell, albeit on a smaller scale and with lower stakes. No other writer I've come across has honed a voice so well to portray a world, developing a vocabulary redolent of the closed world - "...the older knew that Spook Street, like Watling Street, runs backwards and forwards in time"as well as a wicked streak of dry humour -

" 'It was felt that Batchelor wasn't up to the job"

'Why?'

'Because he wasn't up to the job.' "

- and a disturbing insight into character. Batchelor briefly considers suicide, rejects the idea, but knows the thought will come back "...he knew that a seal had been broken, and that he'd be forced to dip into this dark jar again in the future, probably at night."

It's a book about how one is never, never out of the spying game. Even as new contests, new opportunities are born - and new fears - the old players are still in the game, if barely. and when one of them departs, " [he] had finished his journey. This had started many years before, very far away, and ended where the floor began."

One journey ends, another begins. Elsewhere in London is a fresh spy, one who, Herron suggests, will rise to the top of the game: "She was good at this, he registered... Whether she'd had this story up her sleeve, whether it had actually happened, whether she was improvising: didn't matter, she delivered it like a natural."

Endings and beginnings. Mostly there's no room here for the grey and grime of Slough House. But as Batchelor observes, leaving his refuge at Regent's Park early one gleaming, snowy morning, it doesn't stay like that for long. The grey and grime soon shows through and then your feet are soaked in slush.

If I read this book right there's one person who's soon going to get a nasty introduction to that slush, and I'm looking forward to reading more about them in Herron's next book.

Recommended if you want a little gift for Christmas to get a friend or loved on hooked on this series. Or perhaps if you want a little pre Christmas gift for yourself.

Review - London Rules by Mick Herron

London Rules (Slow Horses, 5)
Mick Herron
John Murray, 1 February 2018
HB, 352pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

London Rules. What might those be? Something like George Smiley's Moscow Rules, perhaps - principles honed over many years, helping a spy to survive in hostile territory?

Well, kind of. We soon learn that "Rule one was to cover your arse..." which kind of makes sense and probably encapsulates whatever you might want to say in any longer set of espionage commandments. But when the bad guys begin to play the game, we're warned that if "they want to play London Rules, they should have known to write their wills first".

Rule One is particularly apt for Jackson Lamb's little team of Slow Horses, those would-be spies who have messed up somehow and whose careers have taken a turn into the shabby dead-end corridors of Slough House. The drug addict with anger management issues. The alcoholic. The hacker with just too much ego. And Lamb himself... we found out more here about what sent this magnificent monster to Slough House. (Lamb is a wonderful creation, the fast food eating, unhealthy, hard-drinking,  chain-smoking cop dialled up to a hundred and eleven). The Horses are only there on sufferance. Nobody will look after them. They have to do it all for themselves. And also, they have to do it for all of us. Because it seems that when the gates of Hell open, the smooth operators of "Regent's Park" - home in these stories to MI5's best and brightest - can do nothing to swing them shut again.

A terrorist campaign is playing out, with mounting carnage - 14 dead, in one incident - and nobody knows who is behind it, or why. At the same time (the book is set post the EU Referendum), populist politicians have emerged from under their stones ("recent years had seen a recalibration of political lunacy") including one prominent Brexiteer with a wife who's a notorious tabloid columnist. Thank goodness this is fiction.

As the PM's favourite modernising Muslim campaigns for one of the new Mayorships in the North, the mounting violence might be the perfect opening for Dennis Gimball to make his name.

And then there's an attempt on the life of Slough House's very own, Roderick Ho, hacker extraordinaire, the Rodster, the Rodman (in his own estimation). We're permitted inside Ho's head (ugh) and might just wish his would-be killers well - except that doesn't sit well with Rule One, does it? So the Slow Horses gallop into action ("if you think our little gang of Jason Stillborns'll pass up the chance to mount their own private op, you're forgotten what testosterone smells like...")

What follows is a tautly plotted, often tense, always funny drama that delights in imagery and wordplay and animates its characters with some very shrewd insights. These very from the sly

"Louisa was telling Shirley her idea for a TV show, which would open with a view of Tom Hiddleston walking down a long, long, corridor, shot from behind. River waited. 'Then what?' he asked at last. But the women had misted over, and didn't hear him...",

"It was difficult arguing a point when you had no reliable information or accurate knowledge. Unless you were online, obviously."

to the poetic

"The day was packing its bags and tidying up... during the winter the day tires early, and is out of the door by five: coat on, heading west, see you tomorrow".

There's a nice line in what you might call espionage mythology - Herron notes that "there's nothing Spook Street enjoys more than a legend, unless it's a myth" - with references and nods to some of the classics including of course Le Carre's: like the secret in Le Carre's Smiley trilogy, the answer here lies in an old, old file and Lamb has to track down an old, old archivist to nail it who in, I think a nod to the "Registry Queens" of the Circus is now a "Queen of the Database". But the book builds its own mythology too, mentioning that "Lamb had done his time behind the Wall, and could still read the writing on it" and referring a number of times to the OB, the Old Bastard, grandfather to River, one of the Slow Horses and a man so lost in his legend that he's just that, just lost. The OB was at the centre of the previous book, Spook Street, and it's good to see him still waiting in the wings.

Herron also displays a nicely jaundiced view of the referendum's aftermath ("a frenzy of backstabbing, treachery and double-dealing on a scale not seen since the Spice Girls' reunion"). One of its unforeseen consequences, notes the PM in this book, "was that it had elevated to positions of undue prominence any number of nasty little toerags. Ah well. The people had spoken." and (another Rule) "...when campaigning, lie your head off - the referendum's other great legacy..."

Overall this is a great, compelling read. It's a book that kept me up till 1 in the morning till I had finished it. I devoutly pray that the UK's safety isn't in the hands of anyone like the Slow Horses... or do I?

Review: Spook Street by Mick Herron

Spook Street
Mick Herron
John Murray, 9 February 2017
HB, 340pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book.

I hadn't read a full blown spy thriller for a while, and had never read any of the Jackson Lamb series (this is no 4). I know those who've read the previous books will snap this one up and won't need to bother with reviews like this. But for those yet to meet Lamb and his crew of "slow horses" you've a real treat coming (and Spook Street is a perfectly accessible place to get on board).

The "slow horses" are Security Service assets who aren't quite... up to the mark. Maybe a copybook was blotted in a particularly blatant way? Maybe it's anger management issues, gambling or substance misuse? Whatever, there's a place for you in Slough House, a decrepit block in Central London where careers (and heating systems) go to die. Slowly.

The whole rickety edifice (I'm speaking literally and metaphorically) is presided over by Lamb himself, a magnificent monster of a spy, the apotheosis of the raddled, maverick operative: unkempt, unhealthy, rude, foul mouthed, hard drinking, lacking all respect for authority or procedure, he's the embodiment of the Slough House ethos: you sense the Service would have put a bullet in him long ago if they didn't know full well that he'd cause more trouble dead than alive. (Probably by smoking in the hearse, then clawing his way out of the grave again).

A bullet though the head... loose ends and retirement of assets is the central theme of this book. River Cartwright, grandson of renowned spy David Cartwright (who never quite made First Desk) becomes concerned that his grandfather is beginning to wander, and may become a problem for the Service. Cartwright senior is beginning to see stoats all around - not the furry kind, but watchers. And he's not as defenceless as they might think.

So it's no surprise when someone ends up dead. The Service would like to clear up quietly, but someone brought Lamb onto the case and he does nothing quietly.

Told in convincing insider jargon and through pretty much non-stop action, this book takes you to a world of bitter internal struggle, disillusionment and private warfare. Switching between France and London, it follows Lamb's team in their stumbling attempt to tidy things up, presenting some unforgettable characters in the under-paid, under-performing millenials of Slough House (think, Bridget Jones administering a waterboarding) struggling with their 20s disappointment one minute, engaging in life and death combat the next.

It's far from the world weary sophistication of George Smiley, even as the tentacles of the Cold War reach out to shape the future. New enemies and new threats may abound but their seeds were sown long ago.

I loved this book just for the characters and the setting. It would have worked almost as well if there hadn't been a plot or an immediate threat driving things: Herron has a real gift for people, even if, as here, he happily uses the setting to say something about his people (that glugging, sputtering heating system in Slough House, contrasted with the gleaming glass of the Service's HQ, says it all really). Indeed I wasn't completely persuaded by the threat, but that really didn't matter.

(I also smiled at the scene set by Blackfriars Bridge and the passing mention of the nearby banks, publishers and other undesirables. There does Hodder have its offices again...?)

Looking forward to more Jackson Lamb, and more of Shirley, Rod, Louisa & Co - and pleased I can get an instant fix from the preceding books right now!