Book Review: Slow Horses (2010). Mick Herron.

Hello, and welcome to the new year here at The Memory Cache. Today we're talking about spies, and novels about them.  

I recently became aware of a long-running series of spy thrillers, beginning with this one, Slow Horses, and their author Mick Herron, while reading end of the year book reviews in one of my favorite magazines.

This series of novels is in the process of becoming much more widely popular and better known, since it is now being produced on Apple TV+ as a TV series. I haven’t seen the TV show yet, and haven’t read the books either, except this one, the first in what have become almost annual new installments in the book series (right up to Bad Actors, 2022), but so far, it’s looking very promising.

At one point in my life, I was an enthusiastic fan of spy novels and authors, although not all of them by any means. I generally liked the stories that focused on the people, the relationships, the betrayals, the conspiracies, the lies and deceit – if it’s all just exploding gizmos and car chases, it’s not that interesting to me. I was never a big James Bond fan. But there were other spy stories and writers that I did like.

My favorite author in the genre for many years was Charles McGarry, a former career CIA agent who wrote an entire series of novels about an old American family of blue blood New Englanders, the Christophers, for whom espionage had been the family business for generations. 

There was even one historical romance in the series, The Bride of the Wilderness (1988) about the family’s origins, set in the early colonial era. The greatest of McGarry’s novels, though, was probably The Last Supper (1983), about young Paul Christopher, whose fictional brilliant career but tragic personal life spanned World War II, Vietnam and the Cold War, as well as several of McGarry’s other novels.

McGarry was one of the most literarily satisfying spy writers I’d encountered. His mastery of character, convoluted plots, believable but unforeseen betrayals and realistic spy tradecraft put him at the top of my list of spy novelists for many years. Of course, I read and enjoyed many of the other most celebrated spy novelists of our times too, including John Le Carre’, Frederick Forsyth, Alan Furst and Tom Clancy among others.

But when the Cold War ended, for a while it seemed to me that maybe there wasn’t much to write about anymore, at least with contemporary plot lines and stories, until the 9/11 era got well underway and dispelled our "end of history" illusions. Fortunately, with the writing of Mick Herron, and his Slow Horses (or Slough House) series, we now have a worthy successor to the World War II and Cold War masters of the spy thriller, creating rich new tales of people and espionage in our current moment.

It’s interesting that many of the greatest spy writers of our era, including Le Carre’, Forsyth, McGarry and Ian Fleming, had been spies themselves, which surely informed their portrayals of spy tradecraft, conspiracy and the personalities of their characters. Mick Herron, like Tom Clancy, was not a former spy. He was just a struggling British crime novelist, looking for a new angle to try to achieve some success as a writer. So, he decided to try writing spy novels, and Slow Horses was his first attempt. It was clearly successful.

The setting is modern London circa 2010, where (in the story) MI-5 (Britain’s domestic intelligence organization) maintains a seedy, depressing office called Slough House, populated with secret agents who have somehow failed or embarrassed themselves, and are therefore assigned to pass their days doing demeaning errands and pointless scut work for the “real” agents at Regent’s Park. The whole idea of the place is to put disgraced agents (mocked by their peers as “slow horses”, like the losers that compulsive gamblers always bet on) somewhere so demoralizing that they will quit their jobs and save the organization the trouble of firing them.

In his introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of Slow Horses, Herron reveals that he didn’t really know anything about spies when he set out to write the book, but he did know about organizations, and people, and modern office workplaces. And that is the genius of his premise for the book (and presumably the series).

He tells an engaging story of a group of damaged people in a recognizably dysfunctional modern office environment, at work, under the most demoralizingly bureaucratic circumstances imaginable, and then shows how an unexpected challenge brings out the individual and collective capacity for creativity and heroism in a team of hopelessly normal and flawed humans, in a workplace we can all recognize, even if we’ve never been spies ourselves.

Herron’s ability to describe situations and settings is gifted, and leans toward the dark and comical. I struggled a little to get through the first third of the book, in which he describes this bleak, dirty and depressing office, and introduces each of the seemingly pathetic agents working there. But the writing was so funny, smart and ironic that I stayed with it, until an important plot twist – the kidnapping of a young man by unknown assailants, who threaten to chop off his head – jump starts the members of this hapless group of slow horses to try to do something, and act like secret agents, even if their bosses don’t want them to.

Once we’d met all the characters, toured their shabby offices, and the plot got going, it was almost impossible to put the book down. And in the course of the rest of the story, there were some prescient and very timely observations and plot twists that spoke to genuine perils and afflictions of British society and politics today, as well as the expected dangers and adversity experienced by the characters.

Slow Horses was a lucky first book for 2023 for me – it’s so much fun to read an exciting and entertaining story like this one, and discover there are many more of them waiting to be read. I expect I’ll be bingeing the other ones in the series over the next few months. And no doubt I’ll check out the TV show too, just to see how it compares to the book(s). Highly recommended.