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Book Review: Slow Horses, Mick Herron

Amongst the wealth of literary fiction and fiction nominated for prizes – specifically the Carnegie Medal and Women’s Prize at this time of year – I am often in the midst of worthy or issue-led or meditative novels, all of which I love. But at the same time I am also mired in a morass of marking and teacher assessed grading and work generally and I had been searching around for something more plot-driven to read recently.

And at the same time, Slough House was released which raised much excitement amongst some reading friends who looked to me incredulously with that “Have you never read…?” expression on their faces and in their messages. So I thought Why not? and stepped into the world of espionage and the eponymous Slow Horses, first in the series.

And what, you may ask, is a slow horse? A slow horse is a member of MI5 working from Slough House – an outpost of “Five” for the outcasts and the failures and the mistakes. It is neither a house nor is it in Slough, but as the joke about the etymology of the name goes, a discussion and gossip between spies that runs

Lamb’s been banished. Where’ve they sent him? Somewhere awful? Bad as it gets. God, not Slough? Might as well be.

So within Slough House we meet a range of MI5’s embarrassments, relegated to menial desk jobs and paperwork, cross referencing lists and online dark web chatter for example because Slough House “doesn’t do ops”. This is punishment for their failings in order to break their spirit and encourage them to quit rather than the paperwork entailed by being dismissed. It seems a world unfamiliar with the concept of constructive dismissal but, hey, it is fiction!

Herron introduces us to the location of Slough House and to its inhabitants (inmates?) in a rather unnecessarily quirky way. I was not keen on the opening direct address (“Let us be clear about this much at least: Slough House is not in Slough, nor is it a house”), nor the device of the putative “upstairs rider on a passing bus, delayed for any length of time…” gazing at and surveying the building to introduce it. Nor did the chapter in which every member of Slough House – every slow horse – seems to contemplate simultaneously and in the course of a single evening their individual falls from grace through a variety of faults: classified disks were left on trains; targets of tracking jobs were lost; alcohol addiction; suspected treason; assassinations. And for River Cartwright, a bungled training exercise that brought Kings Cross to a standstill:

‘You crashed King’s Cross.’ ‘Twenty minutes. It was up and running again in twenty minutes.’ ‘You crashed King’s Cross, Cartwright. In rush hour. You turned your upgrade assessment into a circus.’

James Bond, these are not! But nor are they Johnny English. Jackson Lamb who is in charge is formidable in even if he is also “a soft fat rude bastard, still dressed like he’d been thrown through a charity shop window”; River Cartwright who had crashed King’s Cross had been brought up by his grandfather who was espionage’s royalty; Roderick Ho was terrifyingly adept with a PC even if socially inadequate; Catherine Standish, the recovering alcoholic, was briskly stern and almost “Moneypenny”. Sid – Sidonie – Baker was effective and precise as a thief. This was a bunch of agents who may have blundered, but who possessed skills and could be a formidable team. If they could bear to talk to one another.

The plot revolves around a young man of Pakistani background – nephew to the “Second Desk” of their secret service – who appears to have been kidnapped by right wing extremists who promise to behead him live on the internet in 48 hours. Not a threat, a promise: there is no ransom demand, not extortion or political change demanded. Just a promise to behead him. And somehow this threat is connected to a washed up right wing journalist Robert Hobden and MI5 – the true heart of MI5 in Regents Park currently under the auspices of our “Second Desk” Diana Taverner.

Things become murky. Underhand tactics are suspected and deployed on all sides the upshot of which is that Slough House becomes embroiled in and accused of being part of the kidnapping, so a race-against-time develops in which our slow horses must rescue the kidnapped boy and save their own skins.

This really does feel like the first in the series: more of an extended establishing shot – an effective and gripping one, with an interesting cast of characters – for that series. Jackson Lamb and River Cartwright were clearly the standout characters. Although each of the others had potential which may well be developed in later books, I found many of them hastily sketched and quickly forgettable. In contrast, London itself felt very real as the slow horses found themselves outside Blake’s grave, the Globe Theatre, Regent’s Park, King’s Cross…

It was a decently written fun read – ideal for what I was looking for with a fresh balance between drama and humour. It did flag a little in the scenes that focussed around the kidnapped boy – Herron’s prose didn’t feel quite up to the task of capturing his horror and terror – and there was a little heavy handed use of stock characterisation – shock horror, a nerdy Asian – but it is a series I am probably going to return to, and which perhaps promises more than it delivered in this first book.

Characters:

Plot / Pace:

Worldbuilding:

Page Count: 336

Publisher: John Murray

Date: 8th October 2015

Available: Amazon , John Murray

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5 thoughts on “Book Review: Slow Horses, Mick Herron”

[…] am also claiming progress towards Slough House in that I began the series which led up to it with Slow Horses by Mick Herron […]

[…] for years and sank without a trace initially according to The Guardian, and Waterstones made Slow Horses their thriller of the month seven years after it first publication. They have a charming interview […]

[…] Slow Horses, Mick Herron […]

[…] as the first espionage book I really loved for a while, and then perhaps Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series that I have […]

[…] Slow Horses and Dead Lions […]

'Slow Horses' offers a gleefully corrosive vision of British intelligence

John Powers

Gary Oldman heads up a ragtag crew of intelligence agents in Slow Horses. Apple TV+ hide caption

Gary Oldman heads up a ragtag crew of intelligence agents in Slow Horses.

If decades of thrillers are to be trusted, the essence of espionage is not intelligence, but betrayal. The average fictional spy inhabits a world in which their fellow agents may be moles, their bosses may be on the take, and their governments will casually sacrifice them, like so many pawns, in a grand political chess game that only a fool would call idealistic.

Such duplicity takes jauntily amusing form in the work of British novelist Mick Herron, whose Slough House books are the finest spy fiction since the heyday of John le Carré . The series is now being adapted by Apple TV+, starting with the first of the novels, Slow Horses . Boasting a slew of crackerjack actors, this six-part thriller makes an excellent introduction to Herron's gleefully corrosive vision of British intelligence — and of present-day Britain.

Book Reviews

Britain's mi5 spy agency proves more comic than tragic in 'slough house'.

Author Interviews

Novelist john le carré reflects on his own 'legacy' of spying.

Herron's heroes are not Yoda-like geniuses like George Smiley or murderous ladies' men, a la 007 . They're a motley bunch, mockingly known as the "slow horses," who've blown their careers through bungling or bad luck and have been farmed out to a ratty building known as Slough House, near the Barbican station in London. There they do mortifying menial tasks under the contemptuous eye of repulsive Jackson Lamb ( Gary Oldman ), a one-time master spy in Berlin who abuses his underlings with his insults and kazooing flatulence.

One of the series' main jokes is that these losers inevitably keep stumbling into the center of national security crises. That's what happens here, when the swiftest of the slow horses, River Cartwright — played by the terrific Scottish actor Jack Lowden — is assigned to dig through the trash of an ultra-rightwing journalist for reasons that aren't explained. As the grandson of an MI5 legend, River burns to do something important, and so, along with his talented colleague Sid Baker (Olivia Cooke), he begins investigating the reporter on his own.

This digging plunges Slough House into the middle of a huge story — the kidnapping of a wannabe comedian of Pakistani heritage, by the Sons of Albion, a white nationalist group that plans to behead him on camera. The slow horses get caught up in the scheming of MI5's icy second in command, Diana Taverner — played by a perfectly cast Kristin Scott Thomas — and by a posh, amoral conservative M.P. who might remind some of Boris Johnson . If the kidnap victim gets killed, Taverner will seek to pin it on Lamb , who's her bitter enemy.

In moving from print to TV, one loses the witty inventiveness of Herron's prose, yet director James Hawes and screenwriter Will Smith — no, not that one — have done a nifty job of recreating the Slough House universe. They preserve Herron's clever plotting and funny, stylized banter. If they spend a shade too much time with the bickering white nationalist dolts, that's OK. They understand that, in setting up a new series — they've already filmed the second book, Dead Lions — you need to let scenes breathe.

This gives us time to get acquainted with other slow horses. We discover the transcendent obnoxiousness of computer genius, Roddy Ho, played by Christopher Chung, and feel the vulnerability of on-the-wagon Catherine Standish — that's Saskia Reeves — who's essentially Miss Moneypenny fallen into disgrace. We get to watch the surprisingly competent Louisa Guy — played by Rosalind Eleazar — fall in love with sweet, not-so-competent Min Harper, played by Dustin Demri-Burns. Although sometimes inept, these folks care whether they save the kidnapped young man.

For all his scuzziness, so does Lamb, a role that allows Oldman to revel in a rude, liquor-stained riff on le Carré's austere Smiley, whom he played earlier in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy . Oldman is so effortlessly good that I can see why Smith's script expands his role in the plot — you want him on-screen — though I wish the show had resisted the temptation to sentimentalize him a bit. Lamb's better if we don't think that, beneath it all, he's a good guy.

'Tinker, Tailor': The Greatest Spy Story Ever Told

Now, like all of the Slough House stories, Slow Horses is attuned to what's actually going on in British life — in this case, the subterranean connections between thuggish nationalists and ambitious Tory politicians. Yet rather than fulminate about, say, the decline of the British Empire, the show turns the characters' folly and corruption into a dark comedy about a culture gone off the rails. While the characters with any decency are derided for being slow horses, the fast ones are thoroughbreds of self-promotion who dine at the trough of power, and whenever the manure hits the fan, race to cover their well-tailored backsides.

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Review: Slow Horses (Slough House #1) by Mick Herron

London, England: Slough House is where washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what’s left of their failed careers. The “slow horses,” as they’re called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated there. Maybe they botched an Op so badly they can’t be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this line of work. One thing they have in common, though, is they want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there?even if it means having to collaborate with one another. When a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the Internet, the slow horses see an opportunity to redeem themselves. But is the victim really who he appears to be?

POSSIBLE SPOILERS IN THE REVIEW

Dear Mick Herron,

I have had your book on my kindle for a few years (three or four years to be precise). I tried it once or twice, but it just felt slow and more importantly not that easy to read, I felt like I was drowning within the book if that makes sense. Recently I encountered the book in Russian translation in the library and decided to try again.

I am happy to report that I at least finished the book and overall quite liked it. I understand that these series are well known and quite popular and that there is a TV show going on which I have not watched.

I came to this also without reading the reviews at all, but the blurb was clear enough that spies will be the central characters in the story and specifically spies who supposedly did something wrong at one time of their careers, or not even wrong, but something that MI5 did not care for even if this was something that MI5 ordered them to do in the first place. Bottom line – off to the dog house you go, and hopefully you will resign within the next few years, since no serious and/ or exciting assignments will ever be given to you. Of course best laid out plans often do not work out as planned.

Even in translation the first I would say third of this book felt really slow to me. I understood why of course – the author was introducing the characters, just setting up the whole story, describing the place they work in now, etc and more importantly those are people who supposed to use their brains a lot, right? So less running and fighting made perfect sense, although I have to say, I think the author managed to insert some faster bits and pieces in the narrative and it worked well for me, too.

As I said eventually all of these disgraced former spies (no, not former, most of them are still very good) end up participating in an important attempt of trying to save a young man from having his head cut off.

In the meantime we get to observe (and sometimes be very annoyed) at the games the chiefs of the spy agencies play and of course involve their people in playing those games and I have to say this, of course I can imagine that what they do in real life is probably much much worse, ends justify the means and all that, but the stunt that had been played which ended up being connected to our victim made absolutely zero sense to me. I am trying not to spoiler much here, but as much as I get annoyed when innocent people are being stepped upon for the “higher purpose”, as I said I would understand if the result made some sort of sense. I was staring at the page and basically screaming – that’s it? That’s what you did it for and he almost got killed and got saved through no fault of yours? Why was it worth it?

Overall however, I ended up really liking most of the characters from the Slough House and wanted to see them doing more interesting things and already bought book 2.

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Read the Hilarious, Unique Spy Novels Behind the New Gary Oldman TV Series

A series that was once dropped by its publisher is now a hit—and a new apple tv+ show will make it even bigger. get in on the fun now..

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Like many spy novels, the books in Mick Herron’s Slough House series begin with action scenes: a brutal assault on a village, an MI5 agent chasing a suicide bomber through an airport. But as die-hard Slough House fans know, these bursts of excitement are just preludes to the real opener: Herron’s sinuous descriptions of Slough House itself, in each book following a different entity—a stray cat, radiator steam, the dawn’s early light—as it travels through the squalid, grimy, godforsaken offices. This unlikely establishment, where “everything is yellow or grey, and either broken or mended,” is the epicenter of one of the most addictive espionage series going.

Now that series, which starts with Slow Horses , is the basis for Apple’s new TV series of the same name, a faithful, highly entertaining production with Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Jonathan Pryce leading a top-drawer cast that’s amusingly at odds with the bottom-drawer status of Slough House itself. Herron’s is a new and very welcome flavor of spy fiction, grouchy and funny, in keeping with our muddled times. Let the TV series lure you up the grubby back stairs of Slough House, and you’ll have seven (soon to be eight) crackerjack novels to keep you going until Season 2.

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If James Bond is a fantasy of British intelligence still coasting on the uncomplicated glamour of having helped win World War II, and John le Carré’s George Smiley offers the corrective vision of Cold War moral ambiguity, Herron’s Slow Horses are Gen X spies: sidelined, bored, saddled with the worst boss in the world. His name is Jackson Lamb (splendidly played by Gary Oldman in the TV series), and he’s abusive, slovenly, and extravagantly flatulent. Lamb presides over an outpost of MI5 that is “not in Slough, nor is it a house,” but naming it after the town west of London to whose dullness John Betjeman once devoted an entire poem is fitting. American readers may recognize Slough as the setting for the British version of The Office, and a simple, high-concept summary of the series is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy meets The Office .

Slough House is located on London’s Aldersgate Street near the Barbican Tube station, a site Herron has described so precisely that a fan pinpointed the exact address , which was later used in location shooting for the TV series. It’s the place where the British intelligence service sends its washed-out or malfunctioning agents when it can’t easily fire them. The motley crew under Lamb includes a gambling addict, a guy who once left a top-secret file on the bus, a woman with anger management issues for whom cocaine use is “a weekend thing … strictly Thursday to Tuesday,” and an IT guy so obnoxious no other office would have him. We first encounter Jackson Lamb’s shabby domain through the eyes of River Cartwright, a young eager beaver who’s been transferred because he spectacularly blew a training exercise and shut down Kings Cross station. Everyone at Slough House except Lamb dreams of getting back to Regent’s Park, the glitteringly modern headquarters of MI5, although none of the “slow horses,” as they’re nicknamed by their fellow spies, has ever managed it.

One of the pleasures of these gobbleable books is Herron’s intricate plotting, full of twists like the two gunshots near the conclusion of Spook Street that made me laugh out loud at his dark audacity. Herron can certainly write a real spy story, with all the misdirection and sleight of hand that requires. But it’s the surly Slough House mood, the eccentric characters, and Herron’s very black, very dry sense of humor that made me read one after the other without a break. Le Carré’s characters witnessed the collapse of good into bad (if the two had ever been truly separate) under the expedience of superpower politics and bureaucratic self-interest. For Herron’s spooks, there is almost no enemy to become confused with. The roots of the crises the slow horses face often come down to MI5 leadership trying to be too clever by half, or old unfinished Cold War business returning to bite the service in the ass. To them, the Cold War looks a lot like the good old days, filled with purpose, cunning, and derring-do. River in particular, whose grandfather’s status as an espionage legend is the only thing that kept him from getting the sack, idolizes those days. From boyhood, he sat at his grandfather’s feet listening to stories about British spies employing tradecraft to outwit their Soviet counterparts. River “wished he’d been alive then. Had had a part to play.” As a result, he’s always dashing off half-cocked after bad guys or chasing down leads like the action hero he so badly wants to be. The problem is River’s hands-on approach tends to backfire about 80 percent of the time.

Lamb himself is a veteran of the Cold War battles, and Slough House den mother Catherine Standish believes that “when they’d pulled the Wall down he’d built himself another, and had been living behind it ever since.” Those in a position to know occasionally allude to the fact that Lamb has seen things, endured things, done things that the slow horses themselves can barely imagine. He may look and act like a lumbering, cholesterol-choked pig, but nobody gets the drop on him. “Nothing in his physical appearance,” Herron writes, “suggested Lamb could move quickly, but something about his presence suggested you’d be unwise to dismiss the possibility.”

It’s this sullen posture of living under the shadow of a previous generation that gives the Slough House series its Gen X vibe. That, and Herron’s keen attention to the aggravations and doldrums of a mediocre work life, which bears a startling resemblance to the office culture in Douglas Coupland’s seminal 1991 novel, Generation X . In the opening tour of Slough House in 2016’s Real Tigers , Herron writes of the place, “The only reason for the absence of a sign requiring entrants to abandon all hope is that, as every office worker knows, it’s not the hope that kills you. It’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you that kills you.” The slow horses drown in paperwork, bicker over tea bags, cup their hands around fragile flirtations, and lie to each other to make their personal lives sound less pathetic.

The series itself started out as an underdog. Slow Horses was published in the U.K. in 2010, but didn’t sell well enough for Herron’s original publisher to buy the following two novels, which were at first only published in the U.S. by Soho Press. The second novel in the series, Dead Lions , won an award from the Crime Writers’ Association, but it was only in 2015, after a determined British editor gave the series another shot and stuck with it, that Herron finally won a wide audience in his homeland and was able to quit his day job as sub-editor on a legal journal.

But in the universe of Slough House, a spot at the top is far from comfy. While the slow horses grumble and yawn, at Regent’s Park, their higher-ups scheme and backstab. In the place of an opposing foreign power the series has as its abiding antagonist Diana “Lady Di” Taverner, “Second Desk” at MI5. Elegant and steely and born to be played by Kristin Scott Thomas, Taverner is forever conniving with assorted politicians, journalists, and apparatchiks to get to “First Desk.” This gives Herron the opportunity to flaunt his blood-drawing satires of such risible British figures as Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Michael Gove. The supreme achievement among these is the Johnsonian home secretary Peter Judd, whose mediagenic persona as a “lovable scamp” conceals his opinion that

the public was like one of those huge Pacific jellyfish; one enormous, pulsating mass of indifference, drifting wherever the current carried it; an organism without a motive, ambition or original sin to call its own, but which somehow believed, in whatever passed for its brain, that it chose its own leaders and had a say in its own destiny.

With Judd on the rise, Taverner’s superior, a bewigged Machiavellian named Dame Ingrid Tearney, is forced to conclude that “the greatest threat to the Service—and her own role within it—seemed to be emanating from the Home Secretary rather than its more traditional enemies: terrorists, rival security agencies, the Guardian.”

Slow Horses

By Mick Herron. Soho Crime.

No Slough House novel would be complete without a meeting between Lamb and Taverner on a Thames-side bench, where the two face off and play hardball, each one leveraging whatever they have on the other for maximum advantage. If Jackson Lamb has a virtue—and it’s a tough slog searching for it; these novels are not for the tender sensibilities of those who require “likable” characters—it’s that he refuses to abandon his “joes,” which is what Herron’s characters call agents in the field. (And maybe what actual intelligence professionals call them? But my impression is that most espionage novelists make up their own spy lingo.) The TV series makes the most of these atmospheric meetings, and in one episode Taverner asks Lamb, “You care about them, don’t you?” She’s looking for a chink in his armor, but Lamb replies, “No, I think they’re a bunch of fucking losers.” Oldman, unsmiling, adds, “But they’re my losers.”

Exactly how Slough House sustains its reputation as a posting where nothing ever happens has become a bit of a puzzle seven novels into the series. (The eighth Slough House novel, Bad Actors , will be published in May.) Most of the books climax with the slow horses dragged into action, fending off assassins, shooting it out with mercenaries in a library, confronting a Russian gangster on the roof of a skyscraper. For a day or two, they get to act like the kind of spies River wants to be, and not all of them emerge unscathed. Fair warning for those joining us lately as a result of Apple’s excellent adaptation: Herron isn’t afraid to kill off your favorites. As Lamb points out, there are always more screw-ups incoming.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron book review

I was starting to see Slow Horses by Mick Herron absolutely everywhere. I went to a celebration of a book launch at the end of last year where Mick Herron was mentioned, my own dad was reading the series and raving about it and it kept popping up as “popular” when I went to watch anything on Apple TV. So I thought it was time I delved into the world of Slough House and the MI5 rejects that work there.

Please note that this article contains affiliate links. This means if you choose to purchase any products via the links below, I may recieve a small comission at no extra cost to you.

Slow Horses is the first book in the Slough House series which focuses, as I said above, on a group of people who have all done something that has forced them to be moved far down the road to a little, dirty part of London called Slough House. The main focal point of this is Jackson Lamb who leads this rag tag group of abandoned agents and River Cartwright who is a young agent who messed up big time during a training drill that sees his hopeful career dashed, leaving him constantly trying to impress so he can go back to working with the best at Regent Street.

Slow Horses plot – 4.25/5

When a young man is kidnapped and him being tied and and threats are made on a livestream on the internet, for some reason, the team at Slough House are involved and so Cartwright is determined to find out what else is going on here and why the big wigs over at MI5 aren’t the ones who are dealing with this work.

The plot itself confused me at first, as did Herron’s writing. It was very passive and not particularly engaging. But as I continued reading and realised there was a slice of humour embedded into the writing, I really began to enjoy it. It’s not quite “tongue in cheek” but there are constant comical jibes, slightly silly moments and an almost unrealistically unprofessional and relaxed way the characters engaged with each other.

Slow Horses starts off relatively slow but slowly builds up, as is the case with most action thrillers. Unlike a lot of other action thrillers though, there isn’t vast amount of action for a large part of the book with a lot of the story focusing on the characters and their journies.

Slow Horses characters – 4.25/5

As I mentioned above, initially I found the writing very passive and so I didn’t really find myself connecting with the characters, however once I began to understand Herron’s writing and that in fact there was a humour layer to it all, I was very impressed.

Cartwright was my favourite character of them. He was funny, tongue-in-cheek, could take a joke and was also dedicated to proving himself as a genuinely good agent to the MI5 team. His interactions with other characters including a potential love interest were some of the best in the book.

I believe Jackson Lamb is the character who featues throughout the rest of the series as our main protagonist and the leader of the crew. He’s a fascinating character – a reject who’s overweight, drinks too much, smokes too much and appears to have lost all passion for life. There seems to be some deeper secret to him that I imagine we’ll find out more about later in the series.

Slow Horses final rating – 4.25/5

Slow Horses is a big name in the crime genre at the moment and so I felt I had to read it. It started off a little slow but once I realised there was a comedic element and gre accustomed to Mick Herron’s writing style, I started to really enjoy it. The story wasn’t too deep and therefore easy to follow but there were some interesting twists and some questions left unanswered that the next book will hopefully answer. I’ve not read a vast amount of crime books but I think I’ll definitely be picking up the sequel to Slow Horses.

Pick up a copy of Slow Horses .

Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?

By Jill Lepore

Portrait of Mick Herron with his head in the room alongside a smaller version of him sitting in a chair.

Mick Herron is a broad-shouldered Englishman with close-cropped black hair, lightly salted, and fine and long-fingered hands, like a pianist’s or a safecracker’s. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and he is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony. He does not drive a car and he does not own a smartphone, and, in the softly carpeted apartment in Oxford where, wearing woollen slippers, he writes spy novels—the best in a generation, by some estimations, and irrefutably the funniest—he does not have Wi-Fi. He used to be a copy editor. He has never been a secret agent, except insofar as all writers are spies and maybe, lately, so is everyone else.

Spy fiction got good and going in the years before the First World War, and took flight afterward. In 1927, W. Somerset Maugham wrote “Ashenden: or, The British Agent,” about a writer who is recruited into British intelligence by a handler called R. During the war, Maugham had been a spook; he was recruited after “Of Human Bondage” came out. Writers make good joes (as Herron might say): they’re keen observers, and they tend to know languages. (Maugham had French and German.) “If you do well you’ll get no thanks,” R. tells Ashenden, “and if you get into trouble you’ll get no help.” Editors say the same thing to writers.

Maugham’s best-known successors—Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré—were spies, too. Greene worked for M.I.6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence service; Fleming for Naval Intelligence; and le Carré for both M.I.6 and M.I.5, Britain’s security service. Like le Carré, whose wordcraft about spycraft included “mole,” “spook,” and “Moscow rules,” Herron’s got his own lingo, about “the hub” and “dogs” and “tiger teams” and “milkmen.” But Herron, as he himself might put it, has never been to joe country and lives nowhere near Spook Street.

For the longest stretch of Herron’s professional life, he worked in London in the legal department of an employment-issues research firm, copy-editing journal articles, handbooks, and case reports about employment discrimination and wrongful termination. Nights, he wrote detective fiction, and even got some published, but no one bought it. Then he had a breakthrough. “People say write what you know,” Herron says. “So I wrote about people who are failures.” Bob Cratchitting away at job-discrimination case reports, Herron came up with the idea of Slough House, a place where M.I.5 puts bad spies out to pasture. “Sack the useless, and they took you to tribunal for discriminating against useless people,” one character explains. “So the Service bunged the useless into some godforsaken annex and threw paperwork at them, an administrative harassment intended to make them hand in their cards. They called them slow horses. The screw-ups. The losers.” James Bond they are not.

The Slough House novels have been adapted as an Apple TV+ series called, like the first of those novels, “Slow Horses.” It’s slick and sleek and as star-studded as a summer sky. The first season came out last spring, and the second begins this month. Mick Jagger, a Mick Herron fan, recorded its bluesy theme song, “Strange Game.” Kristin Scott Thomas stars as Diana Taverner, Second Desk at M.I.5, with Jonathan Pryce as her long-retired predecessor, David Cartwright, whose grandson River Cartwright, played by the Scottish actor Jack Lowden, is a slow horse trying to kick over the traces. The cast is headed by the inimitable Gary Oldman, as Jackson Lamb. Lamb is an old joe who’s straight out of Dickens, if Dickens had ever invented a character who used the word “twat” all the time.

Even before John le Carré died, nearly two years ago, people had started calling Mick Herron his heir, which is, as publicists say, very selling, but also something of a burden. Herron suspects that le Carré would find his work facetious. Still, that’s not to say there aren’t similarities. A decade ago, Oldman was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of le Carré’s George Smiley in an adaptation of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Oldman says Jackson Lamb is Smiley if everything had gone wrong, although, arguably, everything has.

“Tonight at ten, chaos on all fronts for Liz Truss ,” the BBC announced the night I boarded a red-eye to London. “ITV News at Ten” summed up the day’s high jinks in Westminster a little more colorfully: “The deputy chief whip was reported to have left the scene saying, ‘I’m absolutely F-ing furious, I just don’t F-ing care anymore,’ before he resigned, along with the chief whip. But we’ve just been told they have now officially unresigned. The home secretary has, however, definitely gone.” On Channel 4, one presenter was heard off camera calling a fervent Brexiteer a “cunt.” Welcome to Jackson Lamb’s Britain.

I took a bus from Heathrow to Oxford, a city of sandcastles. Herron and his partner, Jo Howard, picked me up by the side of the road in her black Volvo. I was two hours late. It was raining.

“I’m so sorry we’ve missed the morning,” I said, climbing into the back seat: black, white topstitching.

“Not to worry,” Howard said, pulling into traffic as zippy-fast as a taxi-driver.

“We’ll pop over to the house for a bit and then head out?” Herron asked, looking back at me, wonderingly, black bushy eyebrows raised, a pair of commas. I’d barged in on what was meant to be a weekend getaway to the Malvern Hills with Howard’s two grown daughters. They had graciously agreed to let me tag along as far as a book event in Herefordshire, after which Herron and I would take a train back to Oxford, and then he’d turn around and train back out to meet Howard for what was left of the weekend. Howard downshifted for power, weaved left, weaved right, leaned into a turn on rain-soaked streets. She has corn-silk-yellow hair, pale, delicate features, and, faintly, freckles, and she drives, I decided, not like a taxi-driver but like a cop on a cop show circa 1972. Maybe Michael Douglas in “The Streets of San Francisco.”

Herron and Howard live in a brick row house with two white-socked tortoiseshell tabby cats so handsome they could be cat-food models. Howard is an executive-search consultant—O.K., a headhunter—for the publishing industry. It’s her house. The walls are lined with shelves jammed with hardcover books, alphabetized. Herron moved in during the pandemic. “Boris Johnson said no one could go out,” Howard explained. “So Mick said, ‘I guess I’d better move in.’ ” He kept his flat, though, a ten-minute walk away, and he writes there every weekday, padding around the carpet as soundlessly as Hercule Poirot.

“I’ll make some coffee,” Howard announced, and set about clanking away in the kitchen.

In a sitting room that opens out to a magical back garden, Herron and I sat down each to a sofa, one red, one off-white, like valentines. The cats have their own door, a tunnel through the wall and out to the garden, where they pounce on mice scurrying between potted geraniums and glower at squirrels scrabbling up the clematis that’s strangling a slatted wooden fence. Herron was wearing a black button-up shirt over a gray tee, and jeans, and had swapped out black sneakers for slippers at the door. A lot of people had told me that, notwithstanding his denials, Herron must at some point have been a spy. I wasn’t seeing it, but he’s for sure more of a listener than a talker, and he’d be excellent undercover, a man on tiptoe, cat-footed.

Herron was born in Newcastle, one of six children of an optician and a nursery-school teacher. He read whatever he could get his hands on when he was a kid, climbing the shelves from Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald to Agatha Christie and Dick Francis, and then to Dickens, Austen, and John O’Hara.

“I was addicted to narrative,” he said, pouring out a cup of coffee. “Especially short stories—mainlining.” He went to Oxford, studied English, got a job in a library, and wrote poetry. Then his verse dried up. He decided to try crime fiction. He read everything. “I was attracted by the idea of there being scaffolding.” He liked the structure, like a sonnet, or a sonata.

One of the cats appeared out of nowhere. Through the tunnel? There was much talk of the kittens, their kittenish ways.

“Fair description of a weekend is me sitting around talking about the kittens,” Herron said.

“I’ll just run up to finish packing,” Howard called, dashing up the stairs.

He’d written reams of pages only to destroy them. “My early narrators were fairly hapless, useless men,” he recalled. Then he came up with Sarah Tucker, a bored and frustrated out-of-work lawyer living in South Oxford, ambivalent about having children and married to a creep. When a house on Sarah’s street blows up and everyone blames a faulty gas line, she decides to investigate, aided, eventually, by a take-no-prisoners private eye named Zoë Boehm, who runs a detective agency with her hapless and useless but exquisitely sweet husband, Joe Silvermann. “I introduced Joe in order to kill him,” Herron said, guiltily.

With le Carré, if you read him, you have to figure: here is a man who both hated and feared women. Not Herron, whose detective novels are very convincingly narrated by women. In his first book, “Down Cemetery Road” (2003), the action begins at a dinner party. Sarah’s rotten husband has brought home annoying guests from work. Finally, they leave, and she’s left to clean up:

He’d cancel his subscription to the Guardian before using the phrase Women’s Work, but he’d justify not helping her nevertheless. Hard day at the office; long journey back; had to stand all the way from Paddington. . . . And underneath that, no matter what kind of day he’d had, no matter what she’d said to whoever, there’d be that nasty little jingle that she heard all the time these days, although he’d yet to say it aloud: — It’s not as if you do anything else. Is it, Sarah ?

“It’s the most autobiographical thing I’ve ever written,” Herron said. A house on his street blew up. And he was Sarah: clever, curious, and painfully thwarted.

On July 7, 2005, as Herron was on his way to work, four suicide bombers set off bombs in London, three on subways and one on a bus. He got off the train at Paddington and was trying to get on the tube when he heard a mysterious sound, a muffled thump. Even before people knew what was going on, he said, “it was like the strange light you get before a storm.” The bombings helped persuade him to turn from detective fiction to spy fiction: bigger canvas, higher stakes.

He poured more coffee. He eyed the kittens. “I’m extremely aware that I’m not competent to write about global issues,” he said. “But one of the things I took from 7/7 is that you don’t have to be an expert to be implicated. We’re all implicated.”

He wrote a bridge novel, called “Reconstruction,” about a siege at a day-care center in South Oxford, which leads the local police to call in antiterrorist agents from M.I.5, including Bad Sam Chapman. (“That was just a name. He wasn’t that bad.”) Herron found that he enjoyed writing about spies. He liked le Carré’s term for them: “joes.”

Two women drinking coffee and sitting on park bench.

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In 2008, he began writing “Slow Horses,” a ticking-clock political thriller in which white nationalists calling themselves the Sons of Albion kidnap a British Muslim standup comic and live-stream an announcement that they intend to cut off his head in forty-eight hours. The only M.I.5 agents who appear able to stop them are led by Jackson Lamb, a disgusting, lumpy, vulgar, chain-smoking Rabelaisian wreck of a man. “He’d been said to resemble Timothy Spall, with worse teeth,” Herron writes. ( Kirkus once referred to him as “Flatulent Jackson Lamb,” but, truly, that’s not the half of it.) Herron’s Oxford mysteries had sold poorly in the United Kingdom and barely at all in the United States. His U.K. publisher, Constable & Robinson, was known for its village mysteries. It had not the least idea what to do with “Slow Horses.” And no one believed that white nationalists were anything to worry about.

The rain pelted the stone patio. Upstairs, Howard wrestled suitcases.

Herron read le Carré as a kid, and the slow-horses books are riddled with nods to the master. In le Carré’s novel “Smiley’s People,” there’s a slovenly, foul-mouthed taxi-driver named J. Lamb. Le Carré’s real name was David Cornwell, and David Cartwright might as well be le Carré himself. His grandson River calls him, affectionately, the O.B., the old bastard. He tells another joe about the books the O.B. used to read to him:

“Conrad, Greene, Somerset Maugham.” “Ashenden.” “You get the picture. For my twelfth birthday he bought me le Carré’s collected works. I can still remember what he said about them.” They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true .

“Have you ever met him?” I asked Herron, as Howard came down the stairs.

“I was in the same room with him once,” he offered. At a party.

“And you didn’t go say hello?”

He shook his head.

“Le Carré?” Howard piped up. “I’ve met him.” She’d been trying very hard to stay away, but it was nearly time to leave. “I sat next to him once, twice, at book events,” she said. “Oh, and I’ve got . . .” She crossed the room, pulled “The Night Manager” off a shelf, and flipped to the title page, signed “For Jo, from John le Carré,” and then opened her copy of “The Tailor of Panama,” inscribed “For Jo, really, with all good wishes, from David—really.” The old bastard.

Spy fiction flourished during the Cold War, but that war is over, and Mick Herron is a civilian, so far as anyone knows, writing about espionage in the age of terror: domestic surveillance, homeland security, CCTV, and taking your shoes off to get on an airplane. Le Carré wrote about Moscow rules; Herron added London rules. Moscow rules: watch your back. London rules: cover your ass. The Slough House books are haunted by the Cold War. Lamb is a service legend; at some point, he went undercover in Berlin, and there are veiled hints that he was captured and tortured by the Stasi. He has a mysterious history with the whip-smart Molly Doran, M.I.5’s archivist, who’s in a wheelchair: her legs got blown off. Lamb, differently damaged, came home, Herron writes, “in that blissful break when the world seemed a safer place, between the end of the Cold War and about ten minutes later.”

Le Carré’s George Smiley embodied the Cold War-era decline of the British Empire—upright and betrayed, his disposition of quiet, keep-calm-and-carry-on forbearance a proxy for Britain itself. “Lamb’s position is: I’ve had enough of this, so you can all fuck off,” Herron says. Lamb is Britain in the age of Brexit: angry, embarrassed, and coming apart at the seams.

Herron cleared away the coffee crockery and came back from the kitchen with a handful of treats for the kittens. “Don’t worry,” he whispered to them, kneeling down. “We’ll be back soon.”

Howard rounded up jackets and car keys. Then she remembered one last thing, and switched on the television to set up Netflix for the cat-sitter. The BBC blinked on: a young, shaken reporter stood outside 10 Downing Street. The Prime Minister was about to make an announcement. We sat back down on the sofas, gripped.

“Oi!” Jackson Lamb might have growled from his office on the top floor of Slough House, fishing a cigarette out of one pocket and a lighter out of another. “Tory Spice is on the telly!”

When Truss, at the age of forty-seven, became Prime Minister, The Economist predicted that she’d have “roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce,” and a tabloid started a contest, live-streaming a head of iceberg and asking which would last longer. “You knew where you stood with the lettuce,” Herron said.

Truss stepped up to the lectern and resigned, becoming the shortest-lived Prime Minister in British history. “Supermarket salad is crowned winner,” the Guardian reported later that day. Herron stood up, sighed, and turned off the set.

“I’m a radical feminist, as you know,” Lamb might have said, stubbing out his cigarette. “But the hot flashes always get these old girls in the end.”

The road from Oxford to Ledbury is lined by drystone walls and black-faced sheep. For the longest time, Howard’s car slogged along behind a sluggish gray truck with a single word painted on the back, in red: “Horses.” Howard thumped at the steering wheel, frustrated. “Slow horses,” Herron said, delighted.

Jackson Lamb loves all manner of wordplay. “It’s the only thing he takes pleasure in,” Herron tells me. In one scene, Lamb meets Molly Doran in a church and makes a fuss, moaning and groaning as he settles, wearily, into a pew. Doran turns her wheelchair around to face him:

“Limbs giving you trouble?” she asked, with a hint of sarcasm. “You don’t know the half of it.” He paused. “I said—” “I get it.” “Because you’ve only got half the—” “I get it.”

Lamb owes as much to P. G. Wodehouse as he does to le Carré; he’s got something of the extremity of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Stilton Cheesewright, and Lord Emsworth. The Wall Street Journal compared Herron to Evelyn Waugh. Herron also pays his dues to Dickens, referring, at one point, to Lamb’s secretary, Catherine Standish, as Miss Havisham. Or consider this:

It’s said of Churchill that he’d catnap in an armchair with a teacup in his hand, and when he dropped off the noise of the cup hitting the floor would wake him. He claimed this was all the rest he needed. Jackson Lamb was much the same, the difference being he used a shot glass rather than a teacup and didn’t wake when it fell. Catherine would sometimes find him in the morning, sprawled on his chair like a misplaced squid, the air smelling like water from a vase of week-old flowers.

To play Lamb, Gary Oldman told me, “all I’ve had to do is follow the signposts.” But it’s a brilliant, unmissable performance. He loves playing Lamb. “Me walking around with my greasy hair and my crumpled overcoat,” he said, laughing. “It’s delicious.” He sees Smiley and Lamb as connected: “They’re both disgusted, and they both want to walk away. But they’re addicted, addicted to this life.”

Slough House is bleaker than Bleak House. Also, as readers are told, “Slough House is not in Slough, nor is it a house.” It’s just so far from everything else that it might as well be in Slough. It is, in fact, in London, on Aldersgate Street, next to a Chinese takeout and near the Barbican tube station. (Herron used to walk down Aldersgate on his way to work.) You can find it on Google Maps. “Equally as important as Holmes 221b Baker St. and platform 9¾ at King’s Cross,” an online review read.

“A double yolker!” Herron and Howard shouted out as we passed a pub.

“Two yellow cars,” Herron explained.

Yellow car is a game the slow horses play when they’re very, very bored. You see a yellow car and you say, “Yellow car.” Unless, apparently, you see two.

Slough House / slow horses: that’s just plain wordplay. But to see only the wordplay in Herron’s writing is to miss the lyricism: “The owl flew screaming from the barn, its wingtips bright with flame. For a moment, silhouetted against the blank sky, it was a dying angel, scorched by its own divinity, and then it was just a sooty husk, dropping like an anvil into the nearby trees.” And to focus on the horsing around is to miss the terror. Diana Taverner—“Lady Di,” behind her back—is as fierce and cunning as le Carré’s Karla. She “wore her authority as she might an ermine gown: it kept her warm, and people noticed it.” In one scene, a staffer tells her that an enemy agent has just been assassinated, on her orders:

She took the tablet he offered, read the message on its screen, and smiled. “ Smiert spionam ,” she said. “ . . . Ma’am?” “Ian Fleming,” said Diana Taverner. “Means ‘Death to spies.’ ” And then, because he still looked blank, said, “Google it.”

Early on, when Boris Johnson was still the mayor of London, Herron often drew his characters from life:

Fluffy-haired and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations—Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!!—Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the GBP [Great British Public], which thought him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids’ nanny, robbing the taxman blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes.

As the years have rolled by, Herron hasn’t lacked for material.

“I’ve gotten some angry letters from people who accused me of having disdain for Trump,” Herron said. “I think that’s a misreading. I was going for contempt.”

“There’s a Donald Trump Junior?” Lamb asks, incredulous. “And just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse.”

In Ledbury, a half-timbered medieval market town in Herefordshire, Herron and Howard and I checked into the Feathers Hotel, built around 1565 on the post route from Cheltenham to Aberystwyth. In a lobby with antlers on the walls and overstuffed upholstered furniture, we met the writers Sarah Hilary and Andrew Taylor, along with Taylor’s wife, Caroline. We were all going to have a quick dinner before heading to a discussion about crime writing, part of a series called “Ledburied.”

We walked a few doors down to a posh Italian restaurant. The sun set as we pondered the menu.

“Wine?” Hilary asked, effervescent and organized.

“No wine,” Taylor said. “We have to keep our heads.”

It turns out that crime writers like Italian, especially risotto. Mostly, though, the talk was of agents and editors. When Herron first drafted “Slow Horses,” he planned to blow up Slough House. (He kills off characters all the time: “It’s not a thriller if it’s not thrilling.”) But then he decided he might want to stay a little longer in that house and reimagined the ending. The book came out in 2010; a couple of years later, he finished a sequel, “Dead Lions.” This winter, it’s Season 2 of the Apple series. At the time, however, he couldn’t find a publisher in his own country.

He recalled, “One publisher asked, ‘What even is this? Is it a thriller or is it a comedy?’ Also, no one wanted to publish a sequel when they hadn’t published the first book.” Herron figured, O.K., I guess I’ll never be a full-time writer. But then Juliet Grames, who runs the crime imprint at Soho, an independent American publisher, came along. “I read ‘Dead Lions’ and I said, ‘We have to publish this,’ ” Grames told me. Soho bought the rights to “Slow Horses,” too, but, she says, “we could not get people to listen to us about this guy.” Then, in the U.K., Mark Richards, an editor at the distinguished press John Murray, happened to pick up a copy of “Slow Horses” at the Liverpool Street railway station. Richards’s colleagues see him as the “furniture restorer,” because he can look at an unloved, threadbare sofa and spot its quality. He bought the rights to the first two Slough House books. Not long afterward, Britons voted for Brexit and Americans elected Trump. Suddenly, Peter Judd and the Sons of Albion didn’t seem so far-fetched. The Daily Telegraph dubbed “Slow Horses” one of the best spy novels ever written.

The risotto arrived. “P. D. James,” Hilary began, “once showed up to a book event only to find the bookstore closed and on the locked door a sign reading—”

“Event cancelled for lack of interest,” Herron finished.

“And that wasn’t even at the start of her career,” Taylor put in.

To be a writer of genre fiction is to belong to something akin to an honorable medieval guild. Taylor’s newest book, “The Royal Secret,” is the latest in his series of best-selling thrillers set in seventeenth-century London. When Herron was saddled with being called spy fiction’s “best-kept secret,” Taylor wrote a review in which he said that Herron writes like Raymond Chandler, except better. Both Herron and Taylor blurbed Hilary’s spooky novel “Fragile.” Herron called it “a dark river.”

“Hey, I have my new book jacket!” Hilary remembered. She pulled out her phone to show us the spare and beautiful cover of “Blackthorn.” “They made it into two words,” she said. Everyone agreed that had been the right decision, design-wise.

“Don’t you people ever talk about bloody axes and fingerprints and serial killers?” I asked, disappointed.

“Once, someone collapsed while I was giving a reading,” Herron offered. “Or, no, that happened twice.” Fainted. “Or maybe he was asleep?” No one had died, though.

Hilary put down her fork. “People say it, but it’s true. Crime writers get all their gruesomeness out on the page. In person, they’re the nicest people.”

Real estate agent shows couple house made out of a giant pumpkin.

“It’s the romance writers you have to look out for,” Herron said. “Blood on the carpet, those people.”

After dinner, I followed them down a dark, cobbled alley and into Burgage Hall, a packed space noisy with clatter and gossip and smelling of woodsmoke and damp wool. Stacks of books were piled on folding tables where wine and juice had been poured into plastic cups. A lectern had been pushed to a corner. Old men unbuttoned their coats and doffed their caps; old women settled on seats. You could hear the squelch of muck boots and the chattering of knitting needles. “Secrets and Spies” was the evening’s theme. It might have been a garden-club meeting.

In the morning, Howard headed out to go hiking in the Malvern Hills, and Herron and I boarded a train to Oxford. We sat at a laminated table, face to face, watching rain streak the windows as we sped through the sodden countryside. “See It, Say It, Sorted,” the signs above every door read, flashing green pixels.

In the age of terror, everyone’s on the lookout, on trains, buses, and airplanes—not just under surveillance but conducting it. If you see something, say something . Lamb complains, “It’s like everyone’s a fucking spy.”

I’d listened to each of Herron’s novels as audiobooks, performed by wonderfully versatile actors, with AirPods in my ears. I’d felt like a secret agent, eavesdropping. (Julia Franklin, who recorded the Oxford series, and Gerard Doyle and Seán Barrett, who recorded the Jackson Lamb books, all told me they had to stop reading for laughing.) Reading Herron, or listening to him, is like riding on a carrousel and switching animals every time it goes around. You’re in one person’s head, and then you’re in someone else’s, except, unnervingly, you’re hardly ever in Lamb’s. He’s a cipher, forever undercover.

Every passenger who traipsed past us on the train, wetly squeezing down the aisle, was noted by Herron, absently, as if he were tucking them away in a catalogue of humanity. His slow horses come in every type, and they got kicked out of the service for every imaginable screwup. River Cartwright failed a training exercise. Min Harper left a disk labelled “Top Secret” on a train. Louisa Guy lost a gun seller she was tailing. Marcus Longridge, who is Black, is a gambler; and Shirley Dander, of ambiguous sexuality (don’t ask her), is a coke addict. Roderick Ho, a computer whiz played on the Apple series by Christopher Chung, got sent to Slough House because he’s a twit.

Ho is himself a kind of writer, an inventor of fictional worlds; it amazes him that he can “build a man from links and screenshots, launch him into the world like a paper boat, and he’d just keep sailing.” Herron loves Ho, the spy writer lost in a world of his own invention. “There may come a point where I have to let him grow up a bit,” he admitted, “but then I’d probably have to kill him.”

The office banter is brutal: “While Louisa Guy has been known to speculate that Ho occupies a place somewhere on the right of the autism spectrum, Min Harper has habitually responded that he’s also way out there on the git index.” When Longridge insults Peter Judd and Dander warns him that he’s using hate speech, Longridge snaps, “Of course it’s hate speech. I fucking hate him.”

“I’ve had readers who assume I’m waging a war against political correctness,” Herron said, plainly exasperated. “I am not. I’m absolutely all for treating one another decently. I don’t think Lamb’s waging that war, either.” Lamb’s playing with words and taking the piss:

“I let others do the spade work.” He glanced at Marcus. “Just a phrase. Let’s not involve the thought police.” “We’d need a SWAT team,” Marcus muttered.

Lamb’s also trying to get the people who work for him to quit, because he’s worried about them getting killed. Most of what he does is done to save them. When a bad actor sneaks into Molly Doran’s Records Department and she orders him out and he says he doesn’t “take instructions from a crip,” Lamb finds the guy, breaks both of his legs, and asks him, “Who’s the crip now?”

Herron’s phone rang. It was Howard, calling to make sure we’d caught the train, and asking Herron if he could pick up some sneakers she’d forgotten at the house.

“Yes, yes,” Herron said. “Bye, sweetheart.” And to me: “It’s too wet to go walking. She’s gone to the shops.” We stared out at the slashing rain.

Herron also loves writing Catherine Standish, to whom he’s given the most fully developed backstory—a disordered and drunken past, fatally tied to Lamb’s own darkest deeds. “She’s more aware than any of the others how very badly her life could have gone,” Herron said. “I have that sense about my own life.”

In 2017, after the books began to take off, Herron quit his day job. Not long afterward, he went to a sales-and-marketing meeting at John Murray. The name of the series had been changed from the Slough House mysteries to the Jackson Lamb Thrillers. He was shown posters, ads, and merchandise, down to drink coasters printed with Lambisms: “ When am I not full of joie de fucking vivre ?”

“You do realize,” Herron told the execs slowly, “that in the book I’m writing right now I kill him off?”

Silence. Fidgeting. More silence. “You’re having us on, yeah?”

Splashing through flooded tracks, the train spluttered to a halt at Charlbury, a whistle-stop town on the edge of the Cotswolds about twenty minutes from Oxford. A few passengers got on, umbrellas trailing them like tails. The doors closed. The train sat still as stone, rain pattering, wind rattling. Eventually, over the speaker system the conductor said something that no one could understand for the static, leaving everyone as mystified as slow horses stuck on the underground. “Signalling problems,” a character muses in the third of the Slough House books. “These were often caused by heat, when they weren’t caused by cold, or by things being wet, or dry.”

People started mumbling, grumbling, texting. Ten minutes in, the conductor’s voice came back—hollering now—to announce that the brakes were stuck and that it would take at least an hour to get them unstuck. Brexit budget cuts?

Herron and I trudged out of the train and into the rain. The one-room station was closed. There were no buses into town, or anywhere. No Ubers, no Lyfts. No taxi stand. In slickers, we huddled under the station’s overhanging roof with half a dozen other stranded passengers, including a rosy-cheeked young man and his father, wearing long woollen coats. They’d travelled from Worcestershire, and the son, who couldn’t have been much more than twenty, was on his way to London for a job interview, his first.

“You’ll get there,” Herron assured him. “What’s the job?”

“Fund accountancy.”

“Oh, right. Not to worry. It’s not far. You’ll be fine.”

The job candidate nodded gratefully. Everyone tried calling taxi companies, using cell phones like road flares. No one answered. The rain picked up, and then the wind. It grew, suddenly, quite cold. We were late, we were soaked, and now we were freezing.

“When we get into Oxford,” Herron told me, “I’ve arranged for you to be mugged. Then the food poisoning will kick in around four.”

At last, a taxi pulled up. Two women dressed in fur coats and high boots emerged from the train, dry as toast, and climbed inside. Herron and the aspiring fund accountant’s father dashed out into the rain and begged them to take one more passenger. The son squeezed into the back seat. Herron rapped the car window. “Good luck,” he said. “You’ll be great.”

He ran back under the station roof, shivering.

Moscow rules: watch your back. London rules: cover your ass. Slough House rules: everywhere is joe country. Herron rubbed his hands for warmth and tried to wipe the raindrops from his glasses. My notebook was drenched. I asked him why he avoids writing from inside Jackson Lamb’s head, and he said, “Because I don’t want to break him.” The rain fell like a veil. ♦

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Slow horses, by mick herron.

Slow Horses is a spy novel and the first book in Mick Herron’s Slough House series

Recommendations from our site

“In culture, if you do something new, something original, something that hasn’t been seen before, you will be rewarded. Mick’s books are hugely popular, not just here, but everywhere and I think the principal reason for that is that he’s done something new, which is almost to send up the world of John le Carré, to satirize it. His world is located somewhere between the Circus and The Office . The books are very funny, they celebrate failure, heroism against the odds, and have an old-fashioned bawdy, music hall humor. It’s a very clever reimagining of a world that was extremely familiar to readers, from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold onwards” Read more...

The Best Post-Soviet Spy Thrillers

Charles Cumming , Novelist

Other books by Mick Herron

Bad actors by mick herron, the secret hours by mick herron, joe country by mick herron, our most recommended books, war and peace by leo tolstoy, on liberty by john stuart mill, middlemarch by george eliot, nineteen eighty-four by george orwell, the confessions by augustine (translated by maria boulding), the odyssey by homer and translated by emily wilson.

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Crime Fiction Lover

The complete guide to Mick Herron’s Slough House series

English crime author Mick Herron didn’t begin his writing career with the Slough House series, but there’s no doubt these novels represent his most successful work. The London setting, cast of memorable characters and espionage storylines have made the series ripe for adaptation, and it’s no surprise Apple pulled all the stops, casting such famous names as Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jonathan Pryce and Sophie Okonedo with the production of Slow Horses, which you can now watch on Apple TV+.

The central conceit of the books is that MI5, like any large organisation, needs somewhere to place its most hopeless employees, and this place is Slough House, a building just around the corner from the Barbican Centre. They’re not allowed anywhere near MI5 HQ, which is referred to as Regent’s Park although the organisation is no longer based there.

In the dilapidated offices of Slough House, these files spooks spend their time on various pointless tasks, designed to break their will and bring about their resignations, avoiding the hassle, expense and bad publicity of employment tribunals. One of the first things to appreciate is that each novel is an underdog story – a group of individuals, under-qualified and under-resourced, who have to beat their better-off cousins at The Park to save the day.

Part of the popularity of the series lies in the fact these books simply make you feel good. Everyone enjoys an underdog story of course, but on top of that, the novels are about friendships forged from the common bond of disappointment but tested in life-and-death situations. It’s not universally true – no-one likes the character Roddy Ho, for example – but River Cartwright and Catherine Standish form a bond, as do Louisa Guy and Min Harper, and Shirley Dander and Marcus Longridge.

Humour is another a core ingredient of the series. The subject matter allows for some sophisticated satire and some notable current politicians are lampooned pseudonymously. Alongside that are running gags, observational humour and the vulgar insults Jackson Lamb regularly spits at his team. These are remarkably politically incorrect, but work because of Lamb’s unbreakable loyalty to his misfit crew.

That’s not to say there isn’t heartbreak. Right from the first book, Herron shows he’s not afraid to kill off his creations and some of those deaths hit very hard indeed. His deft and sympathetic characterisation affords the reader a connection with the slow horses (the Park’s nickname for their castoffs) which grows with every triumph, every obstacle overcome, and their losses are felt keenly.

Before we discuss the books in more detail, let’s have a look at some of the main characters.

Jackson Lamb is the head of Slough House and a former Joe, or field agent in Slough House slang. This might explain his loyalty to his team when they are in peril, and makes his otherwise rude and bullying behaviour towards them forgivable. He’s overweight, frequently drunk and appears dishevelled, but many enemies make the mistake of underestimating him. Lamb retains all of his old skills and is a fearsome operator. Unlike the rest of the team, the reason for Lamb’s demotion to Slough House is never revealed.

Catherine Standish is Lamb’s assistant, and a recovering alcoholic. She used to assist Charles Partner, who was First Desk at Regents Park until his suicide – something it’s rumoured Lamb might have had a hand in arranging. Partner had been selling secrets to the Russians.

River Cartwright was sent to Slough House after a training exercise left King’s Cross crashed. He’s a serious young man, and of all the slow horses the most upset at his demotion. He was raised by his grandfather, David, a service legend, and grew up hearing stories of his time in the service.

Louisa Guy was sent to Slough House after she lost a tail involved in gun smuggling. She is one of the most competent agents and appears in every book. She and Min Harper had a brief but intense affair which ended in tragic circumstances.

Roddy Ho is the computer whiz, uber-geek and the butt of everyone’s jokes, not just Lamb’s. He’s ineffectual, arrogant and completely unaware of his failings.

Shirley Dander and Marcus Longridge are the odd couple, though they’re not even a couple. She was in comms at The Park before she laid out a co-worker, and also has addiction issues. He used to break down doors and carry a gun before his gambling problems compromised him.

Outside of Slough House there is Diana Taverner – Lady Di behind her back – the ultra-ambitious Second Desk in charge of Ops. She’s a canny political operator with her eyes on First Desk. Her sometimes ally – or enemy depending on which way the wind is blowing – is Peter Judd , Tory politician and grandee. He is as corrupt as any of the villains in the series.

Some crime series can be read in no particular order but this is not the case here. Herron builds his characters and reveals more about them perhaps as the series unfolds. To appreciate them fully requires an understanding of what they have gone through before. Dander’s character arc, for example, can only really be seen through the prism of her developing friendship with Longridge. Beyond the individual storylines exist a set of meta-plots, developing over the series as a whole, which again must be read in order.

Slow Horses – 2010

Slow Horses by Mick Herron first printing cover

At the height of the war on terror, a British subject is abducted by a terror cell and his beheading is to be streamed live on the internet, but the young man is a British Asian Muslim and the terror cell part of a far-right splinter group. The group have links to a disgraced journalist that Slough House have been investigating. Involving themselves in the drama, the slow horses soon realise that the machinations of The Park are even more twisted than they could ever have imagined. Meanwhile, River comes closer to answering his most burning question: who engineered his transfer to Slough House? Buy now on Amazon

Dead Lions – 2013

Without Lamb’s knowledge, Louisa Guy and Min Harper are seconded by The Park on a baby sitting job. A Russian oligarch is visiting London and elements of The Park want to turn him because a potential future Russian president who owes British Intelligence would be a massive coupe. At the same time, Lamb is out in Oxford looking into the suspicious death of a retired agent. The only clue he finds is an undelivered text – Cicadas. So, what connects the oligarch with an old rumour of Russian sleeper agents? Herron won the prestigious CWA Gold Dagger for this novel, though for my money his debut is a better book. Buy now on Amazon

Real Tigers – 2016

Catherine Standish is abducted by a disgraced soldier with service connections in his past. River cartwright is contacted by the kidnappers and sent into The Park to retrieve secret documents in exchange for her release. Peter Judd, now home secretary, has plans to use the situation for his own ends, but his Tiger Team have motives of their own which don’t necessarily ally with Judd’s. Lamb and Taverner will have to work together to maintain MI5’s independence, but can they put their history of betrayal and revenge behind them? Shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger, Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. Buy now on Amazon

Spook Street – 2017

Regent’s Park has lost three cold bodies – identities or legends in the trade – worked up by the civil service from birth to provide rock-solid cover cover for a Joe in the field. One of them has been used to commit a terrorist atrocity in a London shopping centre. Another has just failed in an attempt to kill David Cartwright. River goes undercover in France to try to find the source while the other slow horses try to work the angle from London.

Spook Street is one of the darker novels and what little comic relief there is, is provided by Roddy Ho getting a girlfriend, a plot thread which is pulled in the follow up novel, London Rules. It also lays the ground for the events of Joe Country, and at the same time introduces a series villain, ex-CIA operative Frank Harkness. This novel is a series highlight for me, and went on to win the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award as well as being shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award, The British Book Awards and The Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. Buy now on Amazon

London Rules – 2018

A North Korean hit squad is conducting a terror operation on British soil, and one particular fly in the ointment is that the plan they are working to is one of the Park’s own. Meanwhile, Claude Whelan, current First Desk, is caught between a weak PM and a populist MP flushed from a successful Brexit referendum. This, like Real Tigers, is one of the more action-packed adventures in the series, and one where several earlier plot lines are resolved to move the bigger story forwards. A befuddled Roddy Ho’s thoughts on The Park’s plumbing is worth the price of admission alone. Shortlisted for a number of prestigious awards including The CWA Steel and Gold Daggers, and The Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award. Buy now on Amazon

Joe Country – 2019

Claire Harper calls Slough House for help after her teenage son, Lucas, goes missing. Louisa Guy goes to Pembrokeshire to find him; after all she had been in a relationship with Min, another slow horse and Lucas’ father. Lucas had seen something he shouldn’t have whilst working a holiday job and his attempt at exploiting the situation is having profound consequences. Frank Harkness, renegade ex-CIA spook, has been brought in to clean up, triggering a confrontation with River at David Cartwright’s funeral. Joe Country is a triumph and, in my opinion, the series highlight so far. It brings to a close several series plots and leads to at last one emotional farewell to a series character. Like the previous novels, it was shortlisted for a number of prestigious wards. Buy now on Amazon

Slough House – 2021

Slough House by Mick Herron second cover

A private funding deal, worked out in secret between Diana Taverner and Peter Judd, gives the Park the resources to strike back at Putin, sending a hit team into Russia to rub out the Novichok poisoners. However, one of the business men behind the deal, looking to make contacts in Russia, passes on sensitive information to the GRU who are looking to escalate matters. Slough House has been compromised, and now a new team of killers is in the UK. They’re looking to pick off the slow horses one by one. Buy now on Amazon

Bad Actors – 2022

Bad Actors takes a look at Brexit and the government advisor who engineered it. Sparrow’s ambition doesn’t end there though. He wants a tame intelligence service ready to do the PM’s bidding and leaks rumours that a government advisor has been subject to extraordinary rendition by an MI5 gone rogue. Thus compromised, Lady Di is forced to go on the run, and has to reach out to the one person she would least like to ask for help… Jackson Lamb. Here, Herron introduces a new slow horse, Ashley Khan, and further develops his subplot of Russian interference in the British establishment. Buy now on Amazon

Also see Mick Herron’s standalone novels, Nobody Walks and This Is What Happened ? Both are excellent books and reviewed on our site. Nobody Walks is even set in the same espionage world as a retired spy digs in to his son’s mysterious death.

24 Comments

Jackson Lamb wasn’t demoted to Slough House – he was given the post, at his request, after Charles Partner died.

That’s how I interpret it. Slough House is his reward for taking care of Charles Partner for MI5.

I think that was the explanation in the Apple TV series, but in the books it wasn’t revealed.

It is referenced in The List which introduces JK Ko and the Germany secret service triple agent

What happened to River Cartwright?

The best way to find out is to read the series.

Ah yes, and that I am doing, but unfortunately not enough e-copies at the library, so have ended up in the most recent book (Bad Actors). Guess I will have to wait for Joe Country (suspecting that is the needed volume) to become available.

Slough House is the one you want to find out about River. Joe Country, then Slough House, if you want them in the right order.

You have to read the 2022 novella “standing by the wall” to find out what happened to River.

First Slow Horse book, after reading quite a few chapters, i could not get Into. Hoped my favorite character would return. (Had to listen 4-5 times to audiobook last chapters of novel previous to this one. Still in disbelief.) Love Heron’s London, his wit, capability with language and how skillfully characters and plots are crafted. Still, I am broken-hearted and may not be able to finish Bad Actors.

Finish it. You will be rewarded at the end.

There are several novellas that introduce new characters and expand the Slough House world. They’re worth reading in sequence.

love this series- absolutely brilliant. yes reading in order is key and just stack them up next to your bed and don’t expect to move for 10 days. i wish it would go on forever. maybe it will. ps the casting in the series on screen is wonderful. i read the first 2 books then saw the series then dove back in…seeing it enhances if have already read some of the books- how you imagine the environment will change once you see it and LAMB, but no matter.

As another commenter notes, do read the novella “Standing by the Wall.”

I made the choice of reading one book out of sequence because it was convenient. Mistake! Try to read the series as written

i will read them again, in order and in 5 years i will read them AGAIN- hoping there will be more by that time. also have read the additional short stories. an excellent present for a fan of this kind of contemporary noir— you will be thanked.

At the end of Bad Actors there is a short story starring River

Jeez, I’m so relieved to know River is still among us. Any mentions of Sid?

To Sue and your question – read Slough House (-:

I have now read all of them plus the novellas and am rather bereft. I love the tv series too.Please Mick Herron write the next book soon.

I loved the books, read them all in sequence and have also thoroughly enjoyed the TV series. My only criticism would be about the final two – Slough House and Bad Actors. I found Slough House ended too abruptly with far more questions than answers remaining, to the extent it felt like Bad Actors was going to be and should have been ‘part 2’. This wasn’t the case and although you do get to the bottom of it all I didn’t like the way it was done. I also found the books got more and more politically biased as the series went on but I didn’t let that cloud my judgement.

Can’t wait for the next book. ? Where is the short story about River?! not in my copy of Bad Actors.

No one has commented on ‘The Secret Hours’ pub 2023. Very good, but to standard but I am concerned of River Cartwright’s recovery from Novichok (sp?). Is he gone forever? Will he and Sid make it back to be heroes of future novels?

Dear B, I wonder if you might suggest how somebody might write a thriller about the INTELLIGENCE services that took as a basis the competence and rightness of the current government?

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Nov 28, 2022

Book Review: SLOW HORSES by Mick Herron

Slough House where MI5 agents are sent when they've royally screwed up, with the hope that those agents will take the hint and resign from the service. Slow Horses, as they are called, are led by the reject of all MI5 rejects, Jackson Lamb, a slobbish, lazy has been with dark secrets in his past. When Lamb is asked to run an errand for Regent's Park, he sends River Cartwright on his first out-of-the-office job since he landed in Slough House eight months earlier. How can rummaging through the trash bags of a washed up journalist link with the video of the hooded man waiting to be beheaded?

In SLOW HORSES , Mick Herron introduces us to a world of spy novels that we don't often see. Instead of the flashy cars, secret gadgets, and sexy male and female agents that we've grown accustomed to seeing in the spy genre, Herron gives us a group of misfits and outcasts who each have been exiled for one reason or another. The ensemble cast of characters, led by Jackson Lamb, are well-developed, each with their own flawed backgrounds and secrets. The plot, although not breakneck like you'd expect from other novels in the genre, is paced well and keeps the reader turning the page. With this being the first book in the series, there is some slowness to expected as readers work their way through character introductions in the first few chapters.

Herron's writing style is unique, being both sharply witty and observant of character weaknesses, with a generous dose of British humor added in to round out the story. Although SLOW HORSES contains plenty of excitement, don't expect the same level of action you might find in other novels, such as the Jason Bourne series. This isn't a book for lovers of action men, femme fatales, car chases, and glitz and glamour. But if you like intricate plots, downbeat characters, and unexpected heroes, then SLOW HORSES is the book for you.

Book Review

Book review: Slow Horses by Mick Herron

Originally published in 2010, Slow Horses is the first of Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series about a band of misfits; former spooks who’ve been cast out of MI5 for all sorts of nefarious deeds. The first three books in the series are being re-published prior to the release of the fourth, Spook Street , which comes out in February.

This was my first outing with Herron, Lamb and the slow horses. It was one which got off to a galloping start, slowed a little midway, but cantered past the finish post with great aplomb… readying me for the next race in the series. (See what I did there? #sorrynotsorry)

Banished to Slough House from the ranks of achievers at Regent's Park for various crimes of drugs and drunkenness, lechery and failure, politics and betrayal, Jackson Lamb's misfit crew of highly trained joes don't run ops, they push paper. But not one of them joined the Intelligence Service to be a 'slow horse'. A boy is kidnapped and held hostage. His beheading is scheduled for live broadcast on the net. And whatever the instructions of the Service, the slow horses aren't going to just sit quiet and watch . . .

This book very much finished on a high for me, despite (what felt like) a lull midway through so I’m very keen to read more in the series. Particularly because this book focuses on one of the newer arrivals at Slough House, River Cartwright… who’s been shunted off there after a training exercise went very wrong.

I was interested (then) to see these books billed as Jackson Lamb’s series – though he’s the pivotal character at Slough House and it’s his fiefdom – we probably get to know him the least of our main cast.

Having said that, I actually like series which feature ensembles and (although I really liked River, whose grandfather was a well-known player in MI5) I will be interested to see if Herron alternates the focus for each in the series. (Edit: having now read a review of a subsequent book in the series, that seems to be the case!)

So we’re initially in River’s head and return there often, though the plot unfolds in third person and Herron transfers us to most of the Slough House staff.

I’ve mentioned before that in the 1990s I demolished all of the John Le Carre, Len Deighton, Robert Ludlum and David Morrell spy / espionage novels I could find. It’s not a genre I’ve spent much time on since then, but I very much enjoyed this, particularly the complexity of the characters and the twisted and secretive world of spies and government power-brokers (and their game-playing).

So, although it felt a little like a scene-setting novel in places… laying the groundwork for what’s to come, and I’m keen to see where we’re lead.

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This sounds like it could be an interesting series despite that lull midway in this first book.

Oh yes Stormi… I think there was just a bit of time filling us in on who is who perhaps, and I wasn’t sure where the book was going at that point.

Hi Deborah, I happened on this book through the free book of the week in iBooks-and loved it! I’ve also read the sequel to Slow Horses and it’s just as good. Agree with your review and like you love spy thrillers. Have you read The Tourist series with Milo Weaver? I really enjoyed these as well. Cheers, Jen.

No I haven’t Jen, I’ll check them out!

Oh this sounds quite good despite the lull. You have me curious Deborah!

Yes Kim, it’s really just that Herron is giving us back stories, so I think that slows it down a little.

I'd love to hear your thoughts Cancel reply

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Book Review: Slow Horses by Mick Herron

RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars

SLOW HORSES (Slough House Book #1) by Mick Herron is a great riveting British espionage thriller and start to the Slough House series. This group of characters are unique, and the story has so many twists I was unable to put it down. Even though this is the first book in a series, it is does have a solid ending and can be read as a standalone.

Slough House is the place that washed up spies go when they can no longer be trusted and used in regular service. It is a place for the “slow horses” to either finish out their MI5 career doing endless office drudgery or quit the service entirely. All hope to one day be called back up to the big game, but none are. The Slough House is headed by the infamous Jackson Lamb.

River Cartwright has waited his entire life to be a part of MI5 like his grandfather, but after a tremendous failure on his last training assignment, he is sent to Slough House. River is determined to not only redeem himself, but prove the mistake during his assignment was not his fault. When a young man is kidnapped and then threatened to be beheaded live on the internet, River believes this is his chance to get out of Slough House, but this kidnapping is not entirely what it seems. Jackson Lamb must count on all his “slow horses”, including River, to pull together to outwit more than kidnappers.

I loved this book and cannot believe I had not already read it. I picked it up because I had heard of the Apple+ series and I prefer to read the book before watching the movie or TV series and I am very glad I did. I always enjoy finding a great story with memorable characters and that it is the first book in a series only makes it better. Jackson Lamb and all the slow horses have very interesting reasons for being sent to Slough House and even though everyone has written them off, they rise to the occasion and prove they are still able to play the game.

This plot has many unexpected twists and surprises that make this espionage thriller a great read and I cannot wait to start book #2 in the series. I highly recommend this book!

About the Author

Mick Herron’s six Slough House novels have been shortlisted for eight CWA Daggers, winning twice, and shortlisted for the Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year three times. The first, Slow Horses, was picked as one of the best twenty spy novels of all time by the Daily Telegraph, while the most recent, Joe Country, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller.

Mick Herron was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Oxford.

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Slow Horses (Slough House) Paperback – March 11, 2014

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Slow Horses (Deluxe Edition) (Slough House)

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Book 1 of 8 Slough House
Print length 329 pages
Language English
Publisher Soho Crime
Publication date March 11, 2014
Dimensions 5 x 0.91 x 7.48 inches
ISBN-10 1616954167
ISBN-13 978-1616954161
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Soho Crime; First Edition (March 11, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 329 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1616954167
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1616954161
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.91 x 7.48 inches
#2,473 in Espionage Thrillers (Books)
#3,643 in Traditional Detective Mysteries (Books)
#105,603 in Genre Literature & Fiction

About the author

Mick herron.

Mick Herron was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Oxford.

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Slow Horses (Deluxe Edition) (Slough House)

By Mick Herron

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All of Mick Herron’s Slough House (Slow Horses) Books in Order

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Since the first book came out back in 2010, Mick Herron's Slough House series has been a favourite among fans of spy novels. With the 2022 release of the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses , however, it's come onto the radar of an entirely new set of people – many of them addicted to the twists and turns and delightful subterfuge of London spy life.

Below, we'll take a look at all the books in the series, along with some fun extras – the in-between entries (novellas), the TV series, and some of Mick Herron's other work.

All of Mick Herron's Slough House (Slow Horses) Books in Order

The Slough House books follow a group of MI5 spies who've been relegated to a shabby, dead-end office because they've each made some kind of serious, career-ending mistake. They've been written off as useless, but the truth is that many are much more competent than their assignment might suggest.

In the books, Mick Herron describes the location of Slough House very precisely – so precisely, in fact, that readers were able to pinpoint the exact location. That location was later used in filming the TV series.

You can browse the real life neighbourhood of Slough house in the Google Maps window below.

Slough House, Book 1 | Slow Horses

This first entry in the series introduces us to the characters in Slough House – the place where failed spies go to run out the clock on their careers. For the most part, they're expected to do low-stakes busy work with no real significance.

That all changes when a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the internet. The slow horses see connections between the case and some of what they've been observing, making it a perfect opportunity to try and redeem themselves.

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Slough House, Book 2 | Dead Lions

Shortly after two Slough House agents are called to protect a visiting Russian oligarch, an old Cold War-era spy is found dead on a bus outside Oxford. Though it looks like a heart attack, Jackson Lamb is convinced the man was murdered.

As they dig into the circumstances surrounding his death, they're drawn into a complex web of Cold War secrets people have died to protect.

Slough House, Book 2.5 | The List (Novella)

Aged spy Dieter Hess is dead, and his death has revealed he had a secret second bank account. His MI5 handler, John Bachelor, will have to figure out whether he was a double agent – and whether his secrets remained safe.

Slough House, Book 3 | Real Tigers

When one of their own is kidnapped and held for ransom, Slough House agents will do anything to save their friend and colleague. That includes breaching the security at MI5's main Regent's Park headquarters to steal valuable intel.

In spite of their low status within the agency, the agents of Slough House will soon find themselves in the middle of something that threatens not just themselves, but all of MI5.

Slough House, Book 4 | Spook Street

What happens when a high-level spy starts showing signs of dementia? If he's unable to keep old secrets, will someone take care of him for good?

River Cartwright finds himself grappling with these worries when his grandfather David, a Cold War-era operative, starts forgetting to wear pants. At the same time, River finds himself occupied with the recent bombing of a busy shopping center. He and his colleagues will have to find out who's responsible before their actions escalate and kill even more innocents.

Slough House, Book 5 | London Rules

At the central MI5 headquarters, the attacks are coming from every direction. Between Brexit and a potential Muslim mayor of the West Midlands who has dark secrets to an apparently random stream of terror attacks, First Desk Claude Whelan is struggling.

Meanwhile at Slough House, the agents have their own problems: grief, addictions, a new and questionable colleague, plus the fact that someone is trying to kill Roddy Ho. Luckily, Jackson Lamb is willing to break a few rules to get things done.

Slough House, Book 5.5 | The (Marylebone) Drop (Novella)

When former spook Solomon Dortmund sees an envelope passing between hands in a Marylebone cafe, he knows he's witnessed something important. When he relays those suspicions to a man who babysits retired spies, however, he sets off a chain of life-changing events.

Slough House, Book 6 | Joe Country

Bad things are happening at Slough House. Catherine Standish is drinking again, Louisa Guy is struggling with lost love, and a new recruit is determined to find out who destroyed his career, no matter what the cost.

Over at Regent's Park, Diana Taverner is also running into difficulties. Accomplishing her goals for the Service might require a deal with the devil.

Jackson Lamb would prefer to put his head down and be left in peace, but when a man who killed a slow horse breaks his cover, he and his team will be forced into action to settle the score.

Slough House, Book 6.5 | The Catch (Novella)

John Bachelor's career is pretty sad. He's not in the field, and not even a desk jockey – but a part-time pension administrator who keeps an eye on retired spies. After the death of his wife and a series of bad choices, he's lost his home and savings. Now, he lives in a dead man's apartment and hopes the bureaucracy won't figure it out.

Unfortunately, having secrets can be a very bad thing, even if you're that far down the spy ladder.

Slough House, Book 7 | Slough House

At Slough House, life is harder than ever. Brexit has taken its toll, members are dying in strange circumstances, and the office has been wiped from official records. They're beginning to get a bit paranoid.

A new populist movement is taking hold on London's streets, and the old order is selling everything off to the highest bidder – so what happens to those who are deemed “surplus”? Jackson Lamb and the other slow horses will find themselves in a fight for their lives.

Slough House, Book 8 | Bad Actors

The intelligence community is thrown into chaos when the Downing Street superforecaster disappears without a trace. Former head of MI5, Claude Whelan, has been tasked with tracking her down, but he gets a nasty surprise when the trail leads him straight to First Desk Diana Taverner. At the same time, a leading figure in Moscow's intelligence has come to London and shaken free of his escort. Could it be connected?

Over at Slough House, the agents are excelling at their specialty – complicating an already difficult situation.

The Slow Horses TV Adaptation

In 2022, Apple TV+ released the first season of their adaptation of the Slough House series. The first series follows the action of book one, and it stars British acting greats Gary Oldman (as Jackson Lamb) and Kristin Scott Thomas (as Diana Taverner).

The series has been a hit so far, and another season films in 2022. With any luck, it will run long enough to cover all the novels. You can check out the trailer below:

Will There be More Slough House Novels?

Given that the most recent novel came out in May 2022 and the TV series has already been renewed for a second series, it's very likely there will be more.

Author Mick Herron is just 58, and the crime publishing imprint Baskerville has secured the rights to three more upcoming titles from Herron – one standalone and two more Slough House books. While nothing is ever guaranteed until it's on the shelves, it's a pretty safe bet we'll be seeing more of the slow horses.

More of Mick Herron

Mick Herron was actively writing before the Slough House series, which helps to explain why it's so good – he's had practice. Below, we take a look at some of his other works – including a couple that aren't technically part of the Slough House series, but which take place in the same world.

Zoë Boehm Series / The Oxford Series

Before the Slough House series, he wrote the Zoë Boehm series. Each book in the series is loosely connected by the presence of PI Zoë Boehm. The books in this series are:

Down Cemetery Road
The Last Voice You Hear
Smoke & Whispers
Reconstruction

Mick Herron's Stand Alone Novels

Herron has also written some stand alone novels, which you can check out below:

Nobody Walks (2015) – this book uses some of the Slough House world and characters, but it's not officially part of the series
This is What Happened (2018)
Dolphin Junction (2021)

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Mick Herron Has Made a Blockbuster Career Writing About Foul-Ups and Has-Beens

The author of the “Slow Horses” series says he relates more with failures. With millions of books sold and the third season of the series airing next month, he may have to wrap his head around success.

The author Mick Herron sits at a wooden table, looking straight at the camera. He wears a plaid shirt in tones of gray, white and blue, and glasses.

By Sarah Lyall

Lyall reported from Oxford, in England.

In 2013, Mick Herron’s rickety literary career looked to be falling apart. None of his novels had sold more than a few hundred copies, and “Slow Horses,” the first book in his acidly funny series about a band of misfits in the British intelligence services, had performed so badly that its sequel, “Dead Lions,” could not find a British publisher.

“Ineptitude has always been a big part of my career,” Herron, who will turn 60 in January, said recently.

Not anymore. Thanks to a series of fortunate events, and to the irresistible allure of the failures and has-beens who populate his books, Herron has become a literary superstar, with total sales surpassing three million copies. On Nov. 29, the third season of the TV adaptation of his “Slow Horses” books, starring Gary Oldman as the slovenly Jackson Lamb, will begin airing on Apple TV+.

“Is Mick Herron the best spy novelist of his generation?” The New Yorker asked in a profile last year.

The answer may well be yes, but Herron is more attuned to the earlier part of his career — the part where nothing went well — than he is to the vertiginous turn in his fortunes. He has a quiet, self-effacing manner, and as he spoke on a wildly wet autumn afternoon, it was occasionally difficult to hear him over the sound of the rain bucketing down outside his living room.

“I empathize more with failures than I do with successes,” he said. “Looking back, I remain at a stage where I’ve been a failure for longer than I’ve been a success. So until it balances out, I’ll always feel that way.”

Herron has been compared to John le Carré for the intricacy of his plotting and the thoroughness of his world building, though the two men differ greatly in tone and in focus. He has also been compared to Charles Dickens and P.G. Wodehouse for his lacerating descriptions and delight in the absurd. (There’s also a touch of Armando Iannucci, the creator of “The Thick of It” and “Veep,” in Herron’s jaundiced depiction of political bungling and infighting.)

But the author remains mostly insulated from the praise, and indeed from much of the outside world. He has a 10-year-old Nokia phone that he uses for calling, texting and checking the time. (“It’s also a torch,” he noted, using the British word for flashlight.) During the pandemic, he moved in with his partner, Jo Howard, an executive-search consultant for the publishing industry, but he has no Wi-Fi in his old house, where he spends his days writing.

He gets the news from the radio and, on weekends, the newspapers. “I never really got my head around it,” he said of the internet.

Herron’s latest book, “The Secret Hours,” is a stand-alone novel on the periphery of the “Slow Horses” universe whose focus is a slow-walking inquiry into historical wrongdoing in MI5, Britain’s domestic spy service. The book is classic Herron, featuring mordant humor, bureaucratic power plays, underappreciated functionaries, bravura action sequences and at least one unexpected casualty.

It’s not that Herron doesn’t care about his characters; it’s that he cares more about his craft.

“I’m writing in a genre which involves, you know, danger,” he said. “If you always have characters in peril who always get out alive, then, after a while, creating any kind of edge is quite difficult. So any time I put a character in danger my regular readers know there’s a good possibility he won’t get out of it.”

Readers of the “Slow Horses” novels will also know that while Herron writes from multiple points of view, he rarely enters the head of Jackson Lamb, his outrageously offensive antihero. Drunken, disheveled and damaged by traumas from his time in the field, Lamb is in charge of Slough House, a sort of rubber room for burned-out and disgraced spies.

“If we knew what he thought, either we would know he meant what he said, which would make him intolerable,” Herron said, “or that he didn’t, which would make it meaningless.”

Herron was raised in Newcastle upon Tyne. Unusually for a product of the English state-school system in the northeast, he went to Oxford, where he studied English. After a hiatus writing poetry, working in the Oxford library system and going on the dole, he took a job as a copy editor at a firm in London that publishes reports about legal proceedings. He spent hours commuting each day.

“That’s when I decided that I had to write something,” he said. Detective fiction suited him because it “provided a kind of structure, a scaffolding,” he said. Though he acquired an agent, Julia Burton — she signed him up after reading an early manuscript that had found its way to the slush pile in her office — it was years before he found a publisher. He has since destroyed his unpublished efforts, he said.

In 2003, he got a contract for “Cemetery Road,” a literary detective novel featuring an unhappily married woman who hires a private detective to help her investigate a mysterious neighborhood explosion, and a murder plot, covered up by the authorities. The book got an advance of 2,000 British pounds and no reviews, Burton said. (It and three sequels are now being considered for a TV adaptation.)

“I accommodated myself quite quickly to the idea that I wasn’t going to make a living out of this,” said Herron. He didn’t exactly mind, in part because, after the London mass-transit bombings of 2005 , he wanted to switch to spy fiction, and the anonymity suited him.

“I was even more introverted than I am now,” he said. “I thought, ‘I don’t have a readership, so nobody is paying attention and nobody is going to get annoyed or upset at anything I write.’ It probably helped me find the tone of voice I ended up using.”

That tone — amused, jaded — is a character in itself. While his work reflects his general disillusionment with Brexit-era Britain, it engages only obliquely with current events. (Alert readers will recognize sly references to Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, in “The Secret Hours.” Herron is not a fan.)

After “Dead Lions” failed to find a British publisher in 2013, Herron’s career was saved by two things. First, Juliet Grames, a new editor at Soho Press, his longtime American publisher, decided to publish the new book — and, in a cheeky move for an American firm, nominated it for Britain’s top crime-fiction prize, the CWA Gold Dagger Award. To the amazement of the guests at the ceremony, and of Herron, “Dead Lions” won.

“It was a bit surprising,” said Herron. “But it meant everything to me. It validated all the work I’d ever done, and it was one of the reasons that my whole career turned around.” Separately, an editor at John Murray in Britain chanced on one of Herron’s books at a train station and signed him up. Once again, he had a British publisher.

Even still, it wasn’t until 2017, when Herron got a rave review on NPR , that sales really began to take off. That same year, Waterstones, the British book chain, made “Slow Horses” a book of the month — seven years after it was first published. And Herron finally quit his copy-editing job.

“Slow Horses” has now sold more than 700,000 copies in the United States alone, said Grames, who is now Soho’s editorial director. Herron’s books — eight “Slow Horses” novels, four Oxford novels, several stand-alone novels and numerous short stories — have been translated into 24 languages.

How has success changed Herron, whose life and work are so entwined with his sense of failure? Obviously, he has more money and freedom, he said; and he’s made friends with other writers, a new experience for someone who worked in obscurity for so long.

He thought for a moment.

“I’m a lot more confident,” he said, “which is nice.”

Howard, who was walking past just then, chimed in.

“Certainly you’re more confident at events,” she said.

“They used to terrify me,” Herron said. “I’d be worrying for more than a week beforehand. Or an interview like this — I’d be fretting about it for ages.”

“Now you speak clearly and confidently but also with humility,” Howard said.

“It’s a shame,” Herron said, “that they don’t give prizes for humility.”

Sarah Lyall is a writer at large, working for a variety of desks including Sports, Culture, Media and International. Previously she was a correspondent in the London bureau, and a reporter for the Culture and Metro desks. More about Sarah Lyall

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Slow Horses

By Mick Herron

[email protected]

Enjoyed reading this book really got into characters and look forward to next book

Really enjoyed this spy novel, a genre I like to read, and will definitely, with haste, seek out more in the series. Too bad the TV adaptation is on a subscription service I don't have or I'd be keen to check that out too.

What happens to Spooks who mess up?

"You know why they call this Slough House?" "Yes." "Because it might as well be in-" "In Slough. Yes. And I know what they call us, too." "They call us slow Horses"...

The story hangs round this interesting premise, full of twists & turns in the vein of Le Carré the Master. Characters come at you quick and fast in short bursts of narrative, imitative of a screenplay. Confusing at first, worth sticking with as we follow our Slow Horses to a satisfactory conclusion.

If the novel calls to mind Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, there's a bit of Len Deighton in the mix too, with weary cynicism and dry humour. I enjoyed, too, what I'm sure is a dig at our current PM. A proper page-turner.

carol.close

There was a mixed review for this book. Members either loved it or didnt. The premiss of the storyline was that the agents involved were inadequate in their roles as agents. The story line was predictable but still kept your interest. Some of the Characters were likable, and as the story progressed you found out how their lives were intertwined it is well written and is also a part of a series of books, which some of the group are going on to read

I am not a fan of thrillers generally and so wasn’t very keen when this was given out at our book group, saying that, I did work my way through it and found it was overall a good read. River Cartwright was a good main character and I could see the effort the author had gone to make the world of spies feel down to earth and relatable and I found this an interesting part of the story as this was made the characters more real. The characters were good and made the story unpredictable. I did enjoy this more than I thought I would but I admit I probably will not be reading any more.

lynneroberts

This book had mixed reviews from the group. Most of liked the descriptions of the characters, but found the plot bit slow in places. Some people didn't like all the bad language, and found it a too violent in places We all felt it was a mix of John le Carre, Spooks and New Tricks tv shows. Two of us like the book so much we have gone onto read the rest in the series

Slough House is where MI5 agents are deposited when they have messed up, a dumping ground for spies who have disgraced themselves in some way. The work they are given is tedious in the extreme, in the hope that they will leave and pursue a career elsewhere. However, most of them cannot envisage doing anything else and are determined to redeem themselves and be returned to the fold. River Cartwright is one of these failed spies and one day he sees just such an opportunity when Hassan, a young man, is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to behead him live online. At first it seems like a crime fuelled by racial hatred but something doesn‘t seem quite right to River and he starts investigating. Presiding over these failed spies is Jackson Lamb and both he and the other Slow Horses at Slough House eventually become involved in tackling this act of terrorism.

This is a great premise for a book - an office populated by highly trained espionage agents who have failed to live up to the exacting standards required of them and have been sidelined into performing the tedious and boring tasks that nobody else wants to do (the kind of tasks that would make reading a telephone directory seem exciting). And then their big chance arrives. So far, so good.

However, for me that is where the positive attributes stopped. The book was very disjointed and quite hard to follow. The narrative is written in small snippets and as it moves from one snippet to the next, the scene changes. I think I understand why it was adapted for TV because this is the way that screenplays work, jumping from one scene to the next constantly. However, I did not want to read a screenplay and at times it did feel as though this is what I was doing. However, I don’t think that this was the only issue. I only know one person who has watched the TV adaptation and their comment was that it started with a bang but lost momentum in the middle. To some extent the book does the same but the fragmented nature of the narrative probably mitigated the initial “bang”, reducing it to a bit of a pop. All in all I was just a bit bored with the book and it felt like a long, hard, slog to reach the end. The character development was also sadly lacking. There are too many characters to get to grips with and even by the end of the book I’m not sure I could have identified them all individually – they were all just a bit featureless. I also struggled to follow the plot but I suspect this is more to do with me than the author – I have the same problem when reading John Le Carre and watching Mission Impossible on TV (I suspect I’m showing my age there, but it was complicated!).

All in all I cannot honestly say that I would recommend this book and will not be jumping through hoops to read more by this author.

St Regulus Sam D

I must disclose that this isn't my 'normal' genre of book. However, despite an interesting premise, focusing on a number of 'misfit' intelligence staff who for various reasons have been 'sent to Coventry' (or in this case Slough House), I found this book very dull, and it took me a very long time to bring myself to finish it. Sorry, not for me, although some in our book Club did enjoy it.

Where do the spies go when they leave classified folders behind on the bus or make a mistake that potentially allows a terrorist to blow himself up taking 34 casulties with him? They end up in Slough House. A department where they are as far away from any action and as boring as being in Slough. This dumping ground is run by Jackson Lamb who is a crude, rude and disgusting man. When a Muslim student comedian is kidnapped, things become interesting for them. This John le Carre style spy novel is well written and very twisty turny. The characters are interesting and the plots/subplots with governmental overrtones and well thought out. I loved the way that the reader had to think for themselves and nothing was absolutely black and white or tied up with a neat little bow. I would highly recommend this page turner to anyone. Once started it is hard to put down. Read and enjoy.

I went into this book expecting a murky John Le Carré-esque spy thriller and I got exactly what I hoped for (although I will say that I've only ever seen adaptations of Le Carré's work without having read the source material). The story follows a group of MI5 agents sent to Slough House, a department where nothing important is accomplished and a dumping ground for all the people the agency would rather forget about. They're a fascinating mix of characters, all vividly presented in three dimensions and all desperate for something to do and to escape their purgatory. As a teenager is abducted, many of them find themselves pulled into action again, with all the intrigue and danger which accompanies it.

The real unexpected delight of this book is the department head, Jackson Lamb. He's such an unusual presence, at times crude and uncaring, at others coarse and abrasive, but always formidable and not without his own strange brand of charm. He refuses to give motivational speeches to spur on his staff, demeans them terribly, yet still somehow inspires.

In spite of its title, it’s a fast-paced book. I loved it and I'm planning on reading the sequel as soon as I can get my hands on it!

St Regulus SM

A clever and unusual plot, set in the hidden world of espionage and politics. All the story twists and turns were fascinating, and I loved the droll and dark humorous writing. River is an appealingly flawed and very human central character. I can't wait to read the rest of the series.

Slow moving and sometimes hard to follow at times almost to the point where I felt like giving up. However I thought it warmed up and got quite exciting towards the end. Not sure that I would read any more in this series as I didn’t really engage with any of the characters.

Standrewsmermaid

The book revolves around a M15 operative who after a mess-up on a case ends up in Slough House which is where the disgraced spooks end up being assigned to. The main character Jackson Lamb and his misfit team investigate the kidnapping of a young man who is about to be beheaded on live t.v. The team need to find the kidnapped man, figure out who and what this young man is in connection to a journialist and why Jacksons bosses want to just pretend this kidnapping isnt happening. Jackson Lamb is wanting to restore his reputation in the world of M15 and is hoping that solving this case will do that. I personally found the book a very slow burner and by the time the action got going half way through this novel I'd lost interest.

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, gary oldman, sharp writing carry very entertaining slow horses.

Apple TV+ has been killing it lately, winning multiple Emmys for “Ted Lasso” and multiple Oscars for “ CODA ,” while also launching some of the best recent dramas, including “Severance,” “ The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey ,” and “ WeCrashed .” To this list of impressive original programming, we can add “Slow Horses,” one of the best spy shows in years, a smart, witty, cleverly plotted piece about a group of outcasts in the world of espionage who end up being essential to a headline-grabbing operation that’s unfolding behind the scenes in a very different way from what the public is seeing on the news every night. The natural comparison will be “ Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ,” but this Gary Oldman vehicle isn’t as calculated, feeling as much like executive producer Graham Yost ’s “Justified” in how that program relied on sharp dialogue and characters who felt instantly three-dimensional to work. It’s one of the best shows of early 2022.

Based on the 2010 novel of the same name by Mick Herron, “Slow Horses” opens with an intense action scene in which an MI5 agent named River Cartwright (the great Jack Lowden of “ Dunkirk ” and the upcoming “Benediction”) is trying to apprehend a potential bombing suspect at Heathrow Airport. It all goes very wrong, and Cartwright, despite having a legacy in the spy business thanks to his famous grandfather David ( Jonathan Pryce ), is shuffled off to a place called Slough House, which isn’t in Slough but is far enough away from the pulse of the British spy game that it might as well be. As if Slough House wasn’t a demeaning enough nickname for this band of outcasts, they get a a secondary nickname based on it that gives the show its title.

The ‘Slow Horses’ are led by Jackson Lamb (a fantastic Gary Oldman), a curmudgeon who makes his disdain for his current assignment known on a daily basis, telling his team that they’re basically paper-pushing rejects and he hates everything about them. River resents being there too, and so he leaps when he suspects that their latest grudge work might be something more. Why are they going through the trash of a famous white supremacist? When evidence needs to be returned to his former allies at MI5, including leader Diana Taverner ( Kristin Scott Thomas ), Cartwright pushes his way into the investigation, basically dragging the whole team with him, which includes characters played by Olivia Cooke , Rosalind Eleazar , and Dustin Demri-Burns . It turns out the surveillance is tied to the kidnapping of a British Muslim young man, whom a fringe group is threatening to behead on national television.

“Slow Horses” is another story of a spy in need of redemption, but writer Will Smith (no, not that one) never takes his concept too pretentiously, allowing for scenes that almost approach workplace comedy among these outcasts, some of whom are at Slough House just because of an understandable mistake. Director James Hawes—a vet who has helmed shows like “Doctor Who,” “Black Mirror,” and “Raised by Wolves”—knows how to balance the intense plotting of a kidnapping spy drama with character beats that keep the show from feeling distant. And so we get hints of Lamb’s past, a forming relationship between spies Min and Louisa, and questions about why a clear talent like Cooke’s Sid would even be there. A show like this needs to find the right rhythm, a balance between character and espionage plotting, and it’s almost dead perfect here, at least when the show focuses on the Slow Horses—long scenes with the kidnappers, especially in later episodes, feel like they could have been shortened a bit, to be fair.

It helps to have a cast who completely understood the assignment. Lowden is believable as both a super spy and someone weighed down by the mistakes he’s made and the lineage he worries about letting down. Oldman is at his best in this kind of cynical, world-weary mode. I could watch him play this character for 20 years. And while Oldman and Lowden are the show's center, everyone is perfectly cast, including legends like Pryce and Thomas and supporting players like Saskia Reeves and Christopher Chung. There’s not one player who feels like they don’t fit, which again reminds me of the consistently perfect casting on “Justified.”

When “Slow Horses” ended in a character revelation that qualifies as a bit of a cliffhanger, I dreaded the inevitable long wait between seasons ... only to be greeted by a preview for season two! It’s already been shot, based on Herron’s book sequel, Dead Lions . There’s no word on when it will air yet, but it can’t be soon enough for me.

Whole season screened for review.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Slow Horses review – Gary Oldman will give you deja vu

This thriller about washed-up spies is certainly tense, but it feels like we’ve seen the Tinker Tailor actor – and co-star Kristin Scott Thomas – play these roles before

The suspect is carrying a suspicious backpack towards a plane loaded with fuel and filling up with passengers. Destination? Marrakech.

Suspect? Male. Age? 20s. Appearance? Asian. Racial profiling? Check.

Mood? Tense. Kristin Scott Thomas’s eyebrows? Arched. Lips? Pursed. “Dogs are standing by, Ma’am,” says her comms guy as she and her team assess the unfolding situation at Stansted airport over TV monitors. Does he mean real dogs or is that code for MI5 operatives in the field? Queries later. National emergency now.

Uber-quiffed maverick espionage hero in improbably well-tailored suit vaults barriers, shoves civilians who get in his way, pins down suspect on the asphalt while bystanders, counterintuitively, don’t film the scene for their Instagram.

Is that an apple in the suspect’s carry-on – or explosives? The former. Damn! MI5 has got the wrong man. “You said Asian male. Blue shirt. White T,” complains our hero, River Cartwright, played by Jack Lowden, to his co-working nemesis, “Spider” Webb, played by Freddie Fox. “No, I said ‘White shirt blue T’,” says Spider who, because he has slicked-back, oleaginous hair and wears braces, clearly can’t be trusted.

Incidental music at 130BPM? Check. Maverick hero chasing after the new suspect, White Shirt Blue T, who is heading to the Stansted Express? Check. On the platform, the new suspect stands smiling even though he is now in our hero’s crosshairs. Detonates device? Check. Screen dissolves to white? Check. Three-figure death toll? You’d think. Scott Thomas’s lips? Incredibly pursed.

And so it begins. Another spy drama, like the recent Ipcress File but more now and, disappointingly, featuring no leopardskin pillbox hats.

Slow Horses (Apple TV+) is adapted from Mick Herron ’s sardonic spy franchise about disgraced spooks banished to a dump called Slough House (think: Sandra Oh’s office in series one of Killing Eve ) for drunkenness, lechery, sociopathy and incompetence. We’ve all worked in that office, am I right? “Another day dawns,” says Gary Oldman as head of Slough House’s loser brigade, “on MI fucking useless.”

Oldman plays Jackson Lamb, a washed-up case who farts himself awake on his office sofa each morning before tackling the leading business of the day: another hangover. On the plus side, he must save on alarm clocks. Have you ever farted yourself awake? Try it. You’ll never need caffeine again.

I’m not saying Scott Thomas and Oldman could have phoned their performances as jaded spies in from their respective poolsides, or that the storyline could have been sketched on a spreadsheet, printed out and left in a dead drop in Regent’s Park for the director, but deja vu is my primary experience of Slow Horses.

Scott Thomas’s eyebrows, the rest of her lemon-sucking froideur and Oldman’s world-weary shtick ought to be modules at Rada, if they aren’t already. At least when Oldman played George Smiley 11 years ago in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy , he was dapper even in his world weariness, whereas here he has holes in socks and what looks like last night’s dinner on his tie.

I imagine Putin’s FSB lickspittles will see this tale of their British equivalents’ incompetence as funnier than Johnny English. But MI5 may well have the last laugh: after all, it’s possible that British TV and cinema is part of a vast misdirection industry that represents our spies as blundering boobs or self-involved martini shakers obsessed with intercontinental legovers. In reality, our spies could be saving Blighty from Johnny Foreigner 24/7. Of course they could.

It turns out that the Stansted incident was a training exercise that our maverick rookie hero failed miserably. As a result, River (his mum was a hippy) has been banished to Slough House to be tormented by Oldman’s old farts, while shuffling towards pensionable age like his sad colleagues in their unacceptable knitwear.

But, of course, that’s not what happens. Instead, River stumbles across a thumb drive belonging to a sleazy blowhard hack (modelled, most likely, on me) containing loony rightwing conspiracy theories. Our hero connects this find to the recent kidnapping of a Leeds University student by the Sons of Albion, who are not, sadly, West Brom fans, but white-pride morons striving to keep Britain British by, without any irony, emulating Islamic State videos.

These plums now threaten to behead the student, ostensibly for an offensive standup comedy routine (which puts Chris Rock’s punishment slap into chastening context). Only our hero, possibly with Sid, the glamorous spy with whom I’ll bet he has a snog during episode three, can redeem his career and British espionage’s reputation. Mood? Tense. Genre? Hokum. Script? By numbers. Likelihood of you catching whole series? I’ll get back to you.

Gary Oldman
Kristin Scott Thomas
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

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'Slow Horses' Author Is Getting Another Series from Apple TV+

Apple TV+ continues success with new series based on Mick Herron's novel Down Cemetery Road, starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson.
Down Cemetery Road will follow Sarah Tucker and private investigator Zoë Boehm in a complex conspiracy.
Slow Horses ' team bringing Mick Herron's Down Cemetery Road to life on Apple TV+. Expect another hit series with Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson.

Apple TV+ has seen tremendous success with its series Slow Horses , the Gary Oldman- starring thriller series based on the popular Slough House novels by Mick Herron . Now, the studio is staying busy with the brain behind Slow Horses, as Apple TV+ will be adapting Herron's first-ever novel, Down Cemetery Road, into a series, according to Deadline . The series will star Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson.

Down Cemetery Road, based on Herron's 2003 novel of the same name, will follow Sarah Tucker (Wilson), who becomes obsessed with finding a neighbor girl who’s disappeared in the aftermath of a house’s explosion in a quiet Oxford suburb, according to a synopsis from Apple. After enlisting the help of private investigator Zoë Boehm (Thompson) in her quest, the pair find themselves in a complex conspiracy that reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead. Down Cemetery Road was the first installment of a four-part book series featuring Zoë Boehm, though it is unclear if further TV adaptations are on the way.

Some of the Slow Horses crew will also be along for the ride on Down Cemetery Road, as Slow Horses writer Morwenna Banks will serve as the lead writer on the show, which will be directed by Natalie Bailey . Banks, Thompson, and Herron will executive produce the series alongside Jamie Laurenson, Hakan Kousetta, and Tom Nash for 60Forty Films. Said Jay Hunt , Apple TV+'s Europe creative director:

" Down Cemetery Road has all the hallmarks of Mick Herron’s funny and acerbic writing, and I’m delighted we will be bringing it to life for Apple TV+ with such a stellar cast. Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson will make it an unmissable companion piece for Slow Horses on our service."

'Slow Horses' Has Been a Huge Hit for Apple

Slow Horses has become one of Apple TV+'s most popular shows in recent memory, and has recently been renewed through a fifth season, so it's no surprise Apple would want to lock up another one of Herron's works. Slow Horses depicts the inner workings of Slough House, an administrative office for British MI5 intelligence agents who perform their jobs poorly. Oldman portrays Jackson Lamb, the head of Slough House, and while Lamb and the rest of his team expect to endure daily monotonous tasks, often find themselves at the center of major spy schemes . The series also stars Kristin Scott Thomas and Jack Lowden , along with numerous guest stars such as Olivia Cooke and Sophie Okonedo, as each season depicts a single one of Herron's Slough House novels.

The series has received critical acclaim, particularly for Oldman's performance. It has garnered numerous nominations at major awards ceremonies , including a British Academy Television Award for Best Drama Series and a Golden Globe for Best Actor for Oldman.

No release date for Down Cemetery Road was revealed. Slow Horses is now streaming on Apple TV+.

Slow Horses

Follows a team of British intelligence agents who serve as a dumping ground department of MI5 due to their career-ending mistakes.

Release Date April 1, 2022

Cast Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, Olivia Cooke

Streaming Service(s) Apple TV+

'Slow Horses' Author Is Getting Another Series from Apple TV+

IMAGES

Slow Horses by Mick Herron (2010, Hardcover) (Ex-Library) 9781569476437
Review: Slow Horses is the most entertaining spy series of the year
Slow Horses: Slough House Thriller 1 by Mick Herron
Slow Horses
Slow Horses: Guía de las temporadas
Slow Horses

COMMENTS

Slow Horses (Slough House, #1) by Mick Herron
March 3, 2017. Slow Horses is Herron's first book in the Slough House series, recently re-released in conjunction with the release of book 4, Spook Street. After a mission gone terribly wrong River Cartwright is sent to Slough House, a place where tasks that didn't matter were preformed by people that didn't care.
Book Review: Slow Horses, Mick Herron
Book Review: Slow Horses, Mick Herron. Posted on May 17, 2021 May 16, 2021 by The Book Lover's Sanctuary. Amongst the wealth of literary fiction and fiction nominated for prizes - specifically the Carnegie Medal and Women's Prize at this time of year - I am often in the midst of worthy or issue-led or meditative novels, all of which I love.
'Slow Horses' review: A gleefully corrosive vision of British ...
Mick Herron's Slough House books center on a ragtag crew of intelligence officers who've blown their careers through bungling or bad luck. The first of those novels is now a clever Apple TV+ series.
Review: Slow Horses (Slough House #1) by Mick Herron
The "slow horses," as they're called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated there. Maybe they botched an Op so badly they can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this ...
Slough House novels by Mick Herron, the basis for Slow Horses
Slow Horses. By Mick Herron. Soho Crime. $15.59 from Bookshop. $11.69 from Amazon. No Slough House novel would be complete without a meeting between Lamb and Taverner on a Thames-side bench, where ...
Author Mick Herron: 'I'd have made an awful spy. I don't have a
Slow Horses, the first in the Slough House series, dawdled. It is a compelling novel about a nationalist group, Sons of Albion, who kidnap a British Muslim standup comic, threatening to behead him ...
Slow Horses by Mick Herron book review
Slow Horses final rating - 4.25/5. Slow Horses is a big name in the crime genre at the moment and so I felt I had to read it. It started off a little slow but once I realised there was a comedic element and gre accustomed to Mick Herron's writing style, I started to really enjoy it. The story wasn't too deep and therefore easy to follow ...
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Slow Horses (Slough House Book 1)
The ones who stick around are called "slow horses," hence the title of this book.Slow Horses opens with MI5 officer River Cartwright tracking a suspected terrorist through King's Cross, one of Lond's major railway stations. Unfortunately, the terrorist detonates a suicide vest before he can be apprehended, killing scores and causing ...
Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?
In 2008, he began writing "Slow Horses," a ticking-clock political thriller in which white nationalists calling themselves the Sons of Albion kidnap a British Muslim standup comic and live ...
Slow Horses
Book Reviews on... Buy now Listen now. Slow Horses by Mick Herron. Slow Horses is a spy novel and the first book in Mick Herron's Slough House series. Recommendations from our site "In culture, if you do something new, something original, something that hasn't been seen before, you will be rewarded. Mick's books are hugely popular, not ...
Mick Herron: 'I look at Jackson Lamb and think: My God, did I write
The books have become critical and commercial successes, and when I pay Herron a socially distant visit, filming is under way on Slow Horses, an adaptation for Apple TV.The Oscar-winning actor ...
Crime writer Mick Herron: 'I don't know my hero's backstory yet'
Mick Herron takes a different approach from most other espionage writers. Real Tigers is the third novel in his Slow Horses series. Its predecessor, Dead Lions, won the CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger ...
The complete guide to Mick Herron's Slough House series
First Slow Horse book, after reading quite a few chapters, i could not get Into. Hoped my favorite character would return. (Had to listen 4-5 times to audiobook last chapters of novel previous to this one. Still in disbelief.) Love Heron's London, his wit, capability with language and how skillfully characters and plots are crafted.
Book Review: SLOW HORSES by Mick Herron
Book Review: SLOW HORSES by Mick Herron. Slough House where MI5 agents are sent when they've royally screwed up, with the hope that those agents will take the hint and resign from the service. Slow Horses, as they are called, are led by the reject of all MI5 rejects, Jackson Lamb, a slobbish, lazy has been with dark secrets in his past.
'Slow Horses' Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Failure
75. Gary Oldman stars as a faded spy overseeing an office full of MI5 losers in "Slow Horses," based on the Mick Herron novel. Jack English/Apple TV+. By Mike Hale. March 31, 2022. When he ...
Book review: Slow Horses by Mick Herron
Book review: Slow Horses by Mick Herron. Originally published in 2010, Slow Horses is the first of Mick Herron's Jackson Lamb series about a band of misfits; former spooks who've been cast out of MI5 for all sorts of nefarious deeds. The first three books in the series are being re-published prior to the release of the fourth, Spook Street ...
Book Review: Slow Horses by Mick Herron
RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars. SLOW HORSES (Slough House Book #1) by Mick Herron is a great riveting British espionage thriller and start to the Slough House series. This group of characters are unique, and the story has so many twists I was unable to put it down. Even though this is the first book in a series, it is does have a solid ending and can ...
Slow Horses (Slough House)
Slow Horses (Deluxe Edition) (Slough House) $12.29. (21,406) In Stock. The first book in CWA Gold Dagger Award-winning British espionage series starring a team of MI5 agents united by one common bond: They've screwed up royally and will do anything to redeem themselves. London, England: Slough House is where the washed-up MI5 spies go to while ...
Slow Horses (Deluxe Edition) (Slough House) by Mick Herron
Slow Horses (Deluxe Edition) (Slough House) by Mick Herron on Bookclubs, the website for organizing a bookclub. ... 4 REVIEWS. Community Reviews. Write a review... TechDaveWV. Mar 27, 2024. 8/10 stars. ... book club tips, giveaways, and more.
All of Mick Herron's Slough House (Slow Horses) Books in Order
Since the first book came out back in 2010, Mick Herron's Slough House series has been a favourite among fans of spy novels. With the 2022 release of the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses, however, it's come onto the radar of an entirely new set of people - many of them addicted to the twists and turns and delightful subterfuge of London spy life.
Mick Herron's Surprise Career as a Blockbuster Spy Novelist
Herron's latest book, "The Secret Hours," is a stand-alone novel on the periphery of the "Slow Horses" universe whose focus is a slow-walking inquiry into historical wrongdoing in MI5 ...
Slow Horses
This book had mixed reviews from the group. Most of liked the descriptions of the characters, but found the plot bit slow in places. Some people didn't like all the bad language, and found it a too violent in places. We all felt it was a mix of John le Carre, Spooks and New Tricks tv shows. JennyC.
Gary Oldman, Sharp Writing Carry Very Entertaining Slow Horses
Based on the 2010 novel of the same name by Mick Herron, "Slow Horses" opens with an intense action scene in which an MI5 agent named River Cartwright (the great Jack Lowden of "Dunkirk" and the upcoming "Benediction") is trying to apprehend a potential bombing suspect at Heathrow Airport. It all goes very wrong, and Cartwright, despite having a legacy in the spy business thanks to ...
Slow Horses review
Slow Horses review - Gary Oldman will give you deja vu. This thriller about washed-up spies is certainly tense, but it feels like we've seen the Tinker Tailor actor - and co-star Kristin ...
'Slow Horses' Author Is Getting Another Series from Apple TV+
Apple TV+ has seen tremendous success with its series Slow Horses, the Gary Oldman-starring thriller series based on the popular Slough House novels by Mick Herron.Now, the studio is staying busy ...

Book Review: Slow Horses, Mick Herron

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Slow Horses – 2010

Dead Lions – 2013

Real Tigers – 2016

Spook Street – 2017

London Rules – 2018

Joe Country – 2019

Slough House – 2021

Bad Actors – 2022

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Slow Horses (Deluxe Edition) (Slough House)

All of Mick Herron’s Slough House (Slow Horses) Books in Order

All of Mick Herron's Slough House (Slow Horses) Books in Order

Slough House, Book 1 | Slow Horses

Slough House, Book 2 | Dead Lions

Slough House, Book 2.5 | The List (Novella)

Slough House, Book 3 | Real Tigers

Slough House, Book 4 | Spook Street

Slough House, Book 5 | London Rules

Slough House, Book 5.5 | The (Marylebone) Drop (Novella)

Slough House, Book 6 | Joe Country

Slough House, Book 6.5 | The Catch (Novella)

Slough House, Book 7 | Slough House

Slough House, Book 8 | Bad Actors

The Slow Horses TV Adaptation

Will There be More Slough House Novels?