Boyd Tonkin

Snafu at Slough House: Bad Actors, by Mick Herron, reviewed

The slow horses fester amid the debris of a chaotic new world order in the latest Jackson Lamb saga

Mick Herron. [Getty Images]

Reviewers who make fancy claims for genre novels tend to sound like needy show-offs or hard-of-thinking dolts. So be it: here’s mine. Anyone who tries to understand modern Britain through its fiction but overlooks Mick Herron’s satirical thrillers merits a punishment posting to the critics’ version of Slough House. That noxious midden of a building opposite the Barbican, its leprous chambers groaning like ‘the internal organs of some giant, diseased beast’, is a sort of landfill site for failed spies. Herron first opened its flaking doors in 2010 with his novel Slow Horses.

Seven books later, his squad of borderline sociopath rejects from polite espionage has risen to the dignity of a luxury cast series on Apple TV+. But the sheer joy of Herron’s bunch of disgraced ‘weirdos and misfits’ comes not just from slyly booby-trapped plots and venom-tipped character drawing. Snappily paced, his comic prose fizzes with an epigrammatic chutzpah, softened by elegiac grace notes.

Meanwhile, magical thinking – or rather plotting – kicks in to ensure that Herron’s whipped underdogs regularly trounce the pedigree chums of privilege and power. If John le Carré’s secret agents played an almost gentlemanly ‘great game’ of Cold War subterfuge, the inmates of Slough House fester amid the debris of a chaotic new world order. Every division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ has melted into a rancorous, treacherous free-for-all of lethal office politics. In Bad Actors, a senior spook recalls the summing-up he added to the post-mortem on another botched op. It read: ‘Don’t use humans.’

Humans, alas, are all Jackson Lamb has on his books. He is the corpulent, flatulent, potty-mouthed ringmaster of the security service’s underperforming ‘slow horses’.

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