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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'.

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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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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?

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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Book Reviews on...

Slow horses, by mick herron.

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

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“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

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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, on liberty by john stuart mill, middlemarch by george eliot, war and peace by leo tolstoy, nineteen eighty-four by george orwell, the confessions by augustine (translated by maria boulding), republic by plato.

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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.

Miss Bates Reads Romance

“miss bates…had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. and yet she was a happy woman…" emma, jane austen, i read mick herron’s slow horses (slough house #1).

Speaking of disreputable, the spooks who people Herron’s world are disgraced and exiled, who didn’t cover themselves in glory for “crimes of drugs and drunkenness and lechery; of politics and betrayal; of unhappiness and doubt; and of…unforgivable carelessness” (15). At their head, in the home of the exiles, in Finsbury’s “Slough House”, “an administrative oubliette where, alongside a pre-digital overflow of paperwork, a post-useful crew of misfits can be stored and left to gather dust,” (16) Jackson Lamb reigns, an overweight, lumbering slob with reserves of sly cleverness, sudden bursts of physical prowess, and a sharp, sarcastic tongue. What we learn is that like his “misfits,” at core, he possesses some, if not spark, glowing ember of moral rectitude. Like Diogenes, with similar unsavory personal-hygiene habits, the greatest cynic is the greatest moralist, disappointed in the world, expecting and finding the worst in humanity, but not in himself, and in Lamb’s case, his disgraced team.

Into Lamb’s world comes likeable River Cartwright, who finds himself out of “Regent’s Park” and the achievers (spooks in good standing) and in as one of Lamb’s eponymous “slow horses”, discredited spooks who no longer work the field. They’ve screwed up, or seen something they shouldn’t, or been in the wrong place at the wrong time and are sent to Slough-House purgatory, forever to push paper and be assigned stultifying jobs. River is handsome, capable, smart, but while in pursuit of a terrorist in the London tube, he “mistook” the suspect, tackled the wrong person and let the Tube blow up with myriad passengers. Truly, River is “in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.” But Lamb, River, and the rest of the slow horses, because the spook world is one of wheels within wheels of opportunism, betrayal, ambition, hubris, and moral decay, are embroiled in rescuing a young man kidnapped by white fascists who plan to behead him “live” on the internet.

I loved Herron’s storytelling voice as he introduces River: “This is how River Cartwright slipped off the fast track and joined the slow horses” (1). Herron plays the reader like the dial on a telescope, bringing us close to character, motive, and action; at other times, distancing us. I don’t know if this was an author not quite in control of his material, or in total control of his material, but I enjoyed it. Moreover, Herron is well-read and I loved his allusions, one of my favourites: “For Catherine Standish, Slough House was Pincher Martin’s rock: unlovely, achingly familiar, and something to cling to when the waves began to crash” (28). I love an author who can ironically use an allusion and let us know he’s working within a tradition.

Herron builds insight into River’s character by giving us glimpses of what life was like being brought up by his grandparents, especially his grandfather, the O.B. (“Old Bastard”), himself once in the “Five” (MI5) and River’s inspiration and role model:

When River remembered his childhood in this house, it was always bright summer, and never a cloud in the sky. So perhaps it had worked, the game the O.B. played; and all the clichés he espoused, or pretended to espouse, had left their mark on River. Sunshine in England, and fields stretching into the distance. When he’d become old enough to learn what his grandfather had really done with his life, and determined to do the same himself, those were the scenes he was thinking about, real or not. And the O.B. would have had an answer for that, too: Doesn’t matter if it’s not real. It’s the idea you have to defend. (87)

Such a spare and clear paragraph about what might drive a young man. Yet there’s more here too; because Herron plays with, using his characters as mouthpieces, different “ideas” of England. There are the “Voice of Albion” kidnappers, who are right-wing, white-supremicist, immigrant-hating bigots, truly the “deplorables” that, years after Herron wrote Slow Horses , would vote for Brexit. There are cynical, self-serving, secretly-class-serving politicians, all bonhomie and glittering dinner-tables, who would have once happily colonized and oppressed, ice-cube clicking G&T in hand and sporting a pith helmet. There are the masses, moving to and fro from work to home to pub and whose lives, in the end, seem to matter more to the slow horses than the “achievers”, victims to the intheknow and powersthatbe.

When, at last, the “slow horses” gather to foil their enemies and save the day (because they do, even if the day, Albion’s day, is already lost in the cherubic face of a certain pale-scruffy-haired politician, or someone very much like him in Herron’s prescient novel) they meet in a graveyard. As they confer and rise to the occasion, they stand on the stones of the English dead, “nonconformists all”:

Blake’s grave lies half a mile or so from Slough House, in Bunhill Fields cemetary. It’s marked by a small headstone, also dedicated to his wife Catherine, and is out in the open, at one end of a paved area lined with benches and sheltered by low trees. The stone doesn’t mark the couple’s exact resting place, but indicates that their remains are not far off. Next to it is a memorial to Defoe; Bunyan’s tomb is yards away. Non-conformists all. Whether that was why Lamb chose it as a meeting place, nobody was prepared to guess, but that was where they gathered all the same.

As Tevye sang, sometimes, “tradition” can lead you to the right place. Herron’s novel delighted and entertained me, but it also made me think. High praise, indeed. I look forward to the rest of the series.

I read my very own lovely, paperback copy published by John Murray in 2017, though Slow Horses was originally published in 2010 by Constable.

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AV Undercover

Slow Horses is an old-school British spy thriller done right

We spy with our little eyes this aces apple tv plus espionage drama starring gary oldman.

Slow Horses doesn’t reinvent the spy thriller because the spy thriller doesn’t need reinventing. Based on author Mick Herron’s award-winning crime novels, Apple TV Plus’ no-nonsense espionage drama—streaming two episodes on April 1, then weekly after that—gets back to basics with a six-episode kidnapping conspiracy that’s played straight and never lets up.

Instead of distracting with high-tech gadgets , CGI-laden chase sequences , and/or inexplicable cocktail parties , Slow Horses relies on tried-and-true tension-builders to get the job done. If you want an excellent slow-burn surveillance mystery delivered point-blank, this is it. It’s produced well, written better, and manages to maintain that one-two punch throughout.

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Gary Oldman stars as Jackson Lamb, a cynical intelligence agent tasked with overseeing the ragtag crew of Slough House, an administrative purgatory where MI5 rejects are left to languish. Enter River Cartwright, played by an exquisitely cast Jack Lowden, who’s stuck there after botching a critical training mission that left dozens “dead” and hundreds more “injured.” This surprisingly public debacle is made only more embarrassing by the shadow of River’s retired spy grandfather David Cartwright (a sparingly used Jonathan Pryce) whose legendary track record precedes even his grandson’s famed failure.

Eight months into River’s so-called Slough House sentence, the discouraged protagonist is surrounded by fellow “Slow Horses”—the series’ title doubles as a derogatory nickname—and hating it. We’re haphazardly introduced to agents Sid Baker (Olivia Cooke), Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), Min Harper (Dustin Demri-Burns), Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar), and Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves) in an understated premiere episode that could just as well set up a workplace comedy.

Slow Horses cast invite you to guess who dies this season in exclusive behind-the-scenes clip

But when British Pakistani student/aspiring stand-up comic Hassan Ahmed (Antonio Aakeel) is abducted by a group of masked men who threaten to kill him on live television, Lamb, River, and a gaggle of other MI5 misfits find themselves ensnared in a political plot that positions the Underdogs/Slow Horses (Under-dorses? Slunder-hogs?) as have-to-be heroes. Even Lamb is pulled into the fray, reluctantly leading agents he doesn’t like or trust.

Where less secure spy sagas double-down or double-cross to make up for lacking heart, this show dares to trust that those along for the ride will be just as compelled by slow-broiling realism. The action swells and shrinks to match what “feels right” for the scenario, while never losing focus on the peripheral elements needed to bring a high-powered chess game into focus.

As such, we learn about the Slow Horses efforts just as we do the inner-workings of MI5’s more illustrious HQ, headed by the steely Diana Taverner (a terrifying and flawless Kristin Scott Thomas), and the fugitive criminals holding Hassan hostage.

The dramatic payoffs are stupendous, too. When you think a mission will go right, sure, there’s a chance it really will. When you fear an undeserving character might die, they very well may. Yet somehow, despite the occasional predictabilities, Slow Horses remains an edge-of-your-seat watch—with a killer finale that’s gut-wrenching start to end.

Of course, the performances best sell this style. Oldman, who at 64-years-old has won or been nominated for most major awards, shines exactly as you’d expect. Lowden plays the ambitious hero with similar success.

But the most notable performances come from Cooke, who dazzles much like she did in Bates Motel , and Brian Vernel, who plays one of the villainous tormentors and steals key scenes episode after episode. If he doesn’t quite match Oldman or Lowden, that’s only because he’s one of the bad guys. His henchmen, played by David Walmsley and Stephen Walters, provide ample support.

Slow Horses ’s first season is chock full of characters, lines, and moments that will work brilliantly for fans of spy thrillers—not gritty spy thrillers, not action-packed spy thrillers, but straight-laced, classic, by-the-book ones. There are more episodes on the way (and more books to adapt). But for now, this conventional addition to an already crowded genre counts as a confirmed kill.

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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

MICHAEL BRADLEY MICHAEL BRADLEY

Award-winning mystery & suspense author.

Michael Bradley
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

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.

25 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

Yes, the books do mention it. I just read it in London Rules, as well.

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?

WELCOME TO CRIME FICTION LOVER

Mick herron's slow horses reaches season four on apple tv+, the trap by ava glass, kalmann and the sleeping mountain by joachim b schmidt, recent comments, astrid: murder in paris returns for season 3, our post-harrogate 2024 reading list…, der pass – the unmissable austro-german crime show, harrogate 2024 report: crime fiction is hot this summer.

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Review: When a British intelligence agent errs in the description of a suspected bomber, following the wrong man while the right one ends up killing and injuring over 100 people, he's sent to a half-way house for spies for rehabilitation in Slow Horses, author Mick Herron's sixth novel of suspense.

An error on the scale of River Carter's would normally get him fired. But because his grandfather was an officer in the agency, he's assigned to Slough House — a place that doesn't officially exist, where "slow horses", agents who have failed in one way or another, are sent to keep them out of the public eye. He joins an agent who lost a child she was tracking, another who left a computer with sensitive information on a train, a recovering alcoholic, and so on. Each is given a menial task to occupy their time. River transcribes cell phone conversations, all the while wondering what it would take to get back to doing field work. No one seems to know. But when he learns that a teenager has been abducted and threatened with being beheaded on live television, the slow horses drop their make-work assignments and band together to discover where the he is being held, risking not only their future careers but also their lives.

The premise of Slow Horses isn't all that original — a group of misfits that come together to achieve a common goal — but the author personalizes each of the characters to such an extent that the reader really cares about them, flaws and all. There are a lot of nuances to the characters, each seeming to have their own agenda, one that may be in conflict with their self-assigned mission. Still, the group is oddly cohesive and one can't help but cheer them on. The short time frame in which they must accomplish their task adds tension, and gives the story a sense of urgency. Slow Horses is a little slow to start and uneven in places, but as a suspense novel, overall it is a good one.

Special thanks to guest reviewer Betty of for contributing her review of Slow Horses.

Acknowledgment: Soho Press provided a copy of Slow Horses for this review.

Selected reviews of other mysteries by this author …

Soho Constable (Hardcover), April 2009
ISBN-13: 9781569475645; ISBN-10: 1569475644

Location(s) referenced in Slow Horses: England

— ♦ —

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

Publisher: Soho Constable
Format: Hardcover
ISBN-13: 978-1-56947-643-7
Publication Date: June 2010
List Price: $25.00

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How To Read the Slough House (Slow Horses) Books in Order

With a new season of Slow Horses streaming on Apple TV+, now is as good of a time as any to look at the books that inspired the series. The Slough House novels by Mick Herron are a great read, so here is how to read all of them in order.

How To Read the Slough House Books in Order

Jackson Lamb stands by a park in London at night

Book 1: Slow Horses

Slow Horses is the first book in the series and is the basis for the first season of the TV show. The novel does an excellent job of introducing us to our main cast of characters, including the head of Slough House, Jackson Lamb, for the first time. It involves the Slow Horses getting dragged into a hostage situation manufactured by MI6 that goes south.

Book 2: Dead Lions

The series’ second book focuses on Jackson Lamb and his crew’s encounter with Cicada’s Russian Sleeper agents from the Cold War. It’s an exhilarating thriller that won the CWA Gold Dagger Award winner and is the focus of the show’s second season.

Book 3: Real Tigers

The third season of Slow Horses is an adaptation of Real Tigers, and the third book involves River and Louisa, two Slow Horses, becoming trapped in an MI6 bomb bunker that’s been transformed into a file archive with a rogue agent. A Tiger Team is sent in to kill the rogue agent and the Slow Horses as they are embroiled in yet another conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of MI6.

Book 4: Spook Street

The fourth season of Slow Horses , which has just started being released, adapts the fourth book in the series. Spook Street posits the question: what happens when an old agent who knows too much begins to lose his mind slowly? The old agent in question is River’s grandfather, who begins to lose his grip on reality right when dark forces from his past come to silence him before he reveals too much.

Book 5: London Rules

The fifth book in the series, London Rules , focuses on a series of terror attacks that have MI6 and the First Desk, particularly, facing harsh and heavy criticism. Roddy Ho, one of the least liked but funniest characters in the series, is at the center of this book, as his narrow escape from one of the terror attacks soon becomes anything but a coincidence.

Related: All Major Actors & Cast List for Slow Horses Season 4

Book 6: Joe Country

The sixth book of the Slough House novels, Joe Country, is something of a continuation of book four, with villain Frank Harkness reappearing. The Slow Horses have a score to settle with Frank after his machinations in Book 4 left one of their own dead, and what follows is a tumultuous and deadly game of cat-and-mouse in Joe Country under the backdrop of snowy and ice-cold terrain.

Book 7: Slough House

The seventh book in the series finds the Slow Horses seemingly wiped from service records, and each member of Slough House is followed, as it seems that the infamous wing of MI6 may be closed down in the darkest way possible.

Book 8: Bad Actors

The latest full-length novel in the Slough House series, Bad Actors , is filled with dark humor and intense political intrigue involving Russian intelligence agents who have seemingly snuck onto British soil.

Book 9: Standing By The Wall

The latest entry in the Slough House book series, Standing By The Wall , is a collection of novellas that take place in between the main books, with the last short story in this book taking place after the Bad Actors novel, making it the latest entry in the series and something you’ll want to pick up if you’ve finished the main series of books.

Bonus: The Secret Hours

Mick Herron’s latest book is a seemingly standalone novel unconnected to the Slough House series. However, eagle-eyed and observant fans of the series will want to pick this book up, as its connections to the broader world of Slow Horses and its critical characters are as intriguing as they are revelatory.

And that’s how to read the Slough House books in order.

Slow Horses is streaming now on Apple TV+.

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Why You Should Read the 'Slow Horses' Books While You Watch the Show

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."

The fourth season of the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses debuted this week, which is as good a reason as any to remind anyone who has not read the Mark Herron novels on which the show is based to hurry up and do so.

Herron is regularly described as a modern master of the spy genre and, yes, that’s accurate, but he’s also a modern master of interesting, messed-up characters who are plagued by self doubt or delusions of grandeur, have laundry lists of bad habits, but nonetheless try desperately to get their acts together. His most electrifying creations, Jackson Lamb (played by Gary Oldman in the series) and Diana Taverner (by Kristin Scott Thomas), are loathsome (Lamb doesn’t bathe and uses flatulence as conversation tool) and cutthroat (Taverner has her henchpeople do the actual cutting), but also somehow sympathetic and inspiring.

You don’t have to read the books in order, but it’s fun to see how Herron fleshes out his characters over eight novels, which are collectively called the Slough House series. And this is the rare case when reading the brilliant source material does not ruin—but instead enhances—the terrific television adaptation. Here, a guide to reading the Slow Horses books in order:

Slow Horses

Herron introduces readers to Slough House, the dilapidated London building where problematic MI5 agents (called "slow horses") are banished in hopes they'll quit or just fade away. Either they screwed up an op, have glaring personal problems, and/or pissed off someone in power: Slow Horses introduces the readers to them.

Two Slough House agents land a promising assignment and perhaps a chance to get back their old jobs back. Jackson Lamb, one of the best or worst (depending on your POV) bosses of all time, investigates the death of a former asset.

Real Tigers

A slow horse agent is kidnapped and the team attempts to band together to plan a rescue. Previously peripheral characters come into focus, illuminating unexpected connections.

Spook Street

River Cartwright must care for his grandfather, a former, cold war era leader of MI5, who is slipping into dementia. New members have joined Slough House, including one who has failed a psych evaluation.

London Rules

Diana Taverner, another indelible Herron creation, bides her time as number two at MI5, waiting for her boss to slip up. Meanwhile, the slow horses try to get to the bottom of a series of domestic terrorist attacks.

Joe Country

The son of a deceased agent has gone missing, or at least some of the slow horses think he has, and once again the dysfunctional crew stumbles into action.

Slough House

It's post Brexit and everyone is scrambling to cut government budgets by privatizing public services, including parts of MI5. What better way to save money than eliminate Slough House?

Diana Taverner, head (or "First Desk") of MI5, finds herself in the crosshairs of an outside investigation lead by a former boss. Meanwhile her Russian counterpart arrives unannounced in London. Could the slow horses possibly offer help?

Slough House Thriller Series Books 1 - 6 Collection Box Set by Mick Herron (Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules & Joe Country)

The first six novels in the Slough House series are available in a box set.

Slough House Thriller Series Books 1 - 6 Collection Box Set by Mick Herron (Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules & Joe Country)

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.

Apple TV’s British spy thriller Slow Horses simply delivers

Gary Oldman leads a series that pretends to subvert, but thankfully doesn’t

by Oli Welsh

Gary Oldman and two of his team stand on a dark street at night time

“What if a hyper-competent fictional archetype was actually just bad at their job?” is a tried and trusted setup. It’s usually mined for broad comedy: Think of Rowan Atkinson’s terrible James Bond spoof, Johnny English. It’s an easy route into parody, and the bathos and sight gags come naturally when your super-spy, or your vampire hunter, or your detective, is actually just a doofus.

Slow Horses , a new British spy drama streaming on Apple TV Plus, puts a different spin on it. These spies aren’t idiots, necessarily. But they are fuck-ups. Maybe they drink too much, maybe they don’t have the nerves for it, maybe they made one unforgivable mistake. Maybe they’re just mediocre. They’re not bad enough to give the sack, but not good enough to give anything important to do.

Rather than mine this situation for workplace comedy, Slow Horses thrusts its unlikely heroes into a fairly straight espionage thriller and asks them to keep up. Sometimes the results are funny, undercutting the pomposity of the genre. And sometimes they’re pretty sharp.

What is Slow Horses?

The Slough House spies turn to look over their shoulders

Slow Horses is a fairly close adaptation of the 2010 spy novel of the same name by Mick Herron, the first in Herron’s “Slough House” series about a crew of underachieving spies in MI5, the domestic arm of the British intelligence services. Herron has written 10 more books in the series, so if Apple TV Plus decides it wants to go back to the well, it has plenty of material to draw on. Herron combines robust thriller plots with a sardonic, humorous tone and a John Le Carré -style fascination with the political treachery and practical tradecraft of the secret intelligence world. And Apple’s deep pockets have brought two big stars to the series: Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott-Thomas.

Who’s behind the show?

Slow Horses is written and produced by Will Smith (no, not that one), a former stand-up comedian who has worked closely with Armando Ianucci on UK political satire The Thick of It and Ianucci’s follow-up take on U.S. politics, Veep . Apple may be hoping that, in Smith, it has found its version of Succession creator Jesse Armstrong: another Ianucci-adjacent British writer with a cynical worldview and taste for bitter absurdity. His tone is certainly a good match for Herron’s, and an aptitude for skewering the British political class will go a long way in the world of Slough House. But this isn’t Veep or Succession ; it’s a mystery thriller, and a pretty good one.

What’s it about?

Gary Oldman and Jack Lowden look worried in a corridor

River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is a promising MI5 recruit whose grandfather (Jonathan Pryce) is spy royalty. But when a training exercise ends in disaster, River finds himself banished to Slough House, a dingy purgatory for the Service’s unwanted strays, overseen by slobby has-been Jackson Lamb (Oldman).

Chafing at the menial tasks he’s given, and itching to serve his country, River’s curiosity is aroused when his deskmate Sid (Olivia Cooke) is sent to steal files from a right-wing journalist. Slough House isn’t usually trusted to run operations, so why now? What is the apparently capable Sid doing in Slough House anyway? What game are the much slicker spooks at Regent’s Park, the head office ruled by Diana Tavener (Scott-Thomas), playing? Does Lamb really care as little as he appears to?

The plot thickens and the stakes are raised when a student, the son of Pakistani-born immigrants, is kidnapped by right-wing nationalist terrorists and paraded on a livestream with the threat that he will be beheaded. River resolves to do something, and the other “Slow Horses” get dragged into it — including Lamb, who, as Tavener warns darkly, is “burned out for a reason” and may not be as incompetent as he seems.

What’s Slow Horses really about?

Above all else, Slow Horses is about living with the ghost of Le Carré. It’s about finding a way to make the sort of grounded, politically pointed, exquisitely twisty spy thrillers of which Le Carré was the undisputed master work in a modern world. The producers surely cast Gary Oldman, in part, to summon the memory of his performance as George Smiley ( scientifically proven to be the greatest British fictional spy ) in the 2011 film of Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy .

So it’s about intelligence war rooms dominated by huge multi-screen displays. It’s about clandestine meetings in empty cricket grounds. It’s about intelligence briefings with testy politicians. It’s about dead drops, and burn boxes, and encrypted files, and picking phones out of trash cans, and large men with earpieces stepping out of black SUVs. It’s about sparing but quite shocking moments of violence. It’s about every character having an uncertain motivation, and an even more uncertain fate.

Kristian Scott-Thomas and a crowd of suited intelligence officers look worried

As it scrapes away beneath the scurrilous machinations of the intelligence community, Slow Horses does dig into a bigger topic: sickness and division in the body politic in modern Britain. Le Carré used the international espionage of MI6 to examine Britain’s place in the world and cast a mournful eye on its history. Slow Horses uses MI5’s domestic agenda to look inward at the fault-lines in British society and the way unscrupulous journalists, politicians — and, yes, spies — are exploiting them for their own ends.

Is Slow Horses good?

Slow Horses is a solid, purposeful spy thriller that hits all the notes you want it to hit. The plot is satisfyingly dense and unpredictable without being unreadably labyrinthine. It’s expertly paced, and Smith’s scripts balance cutting humor with a real sense of danger and a hint of moral backbone.

Despite the splashy cast, this isn’t a particularly ambitious show, and it notably doesn’t think it’s high cinema. British TV abounds with lean, well-made, six-episode thrillers like this (shows like Line of Duty and Happy Valley ) and the only thing that distinguishes Slow Horses from the rest of them is the magnitude of the stars and a certain visual gloss brought by Apple’s budget. That’s a good thing; this recipe for TV potboilers doesn’t need to be messed with. What it needs is twists that are carefully placed and not overplayed, a sense of urgency, a sense of place, and charismatic characters. Slow Horses has all of these, and director James Hawes, a TV veteran, knows just how to make the most of them.

While Oldman may have been cast for his buttoned-down Smiley, here he’s back in a mode he spent much of his early career in — cursing obnoxiously in a thick London accent — and he’s clearly relishing playing to type. You can say the same of Scott-Thomas, archly clicking down shiny corridors and snapping off orders to underlings, looking silky and refined. These aren’t profound characters, but they are fun archetypes.

What gives the show its heart, though, is the motley crew assembled around them. Finding out, one by one, what fatal flaw condemned these losers to Slough House, and watching them overcome those flaws and build a reluctant family, is a great formula for uncomfortable comfort TV.

When and where can you watch Slow Horses?

The first two episodes are on Apple TV Plus now. New episodes of the six-episode series will drop every Friday.

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Slow Horses review: Gary Oldman spy series is brilliant, grumpy and very British

From ‘veep’ and ‘the thick of it’ writer will smith, this apple tv+ series has a sliver of comic apathy running through it, article bookmarked.

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Two very different versions of England have launched on American streaming platforms this week. The London of Disney Plus’ Marvel series Moon Knight is a tourist fantasy – an open-top bus of a city, one populated by EastEnders caricatures and Oscar Isaac as the scarily accented love child of Russell Brand and Anne Hathaway in One Day . Comparatively, Apple TV’s Slow Horses , a pitch-black comedy about not-very-good spies, is English to its core. Everyone is miserable, the streets are dirty, and the camera filter is the colour of a damp paperback stuffed in the backroom of an Oxfam. It feels like home.

Perhaps it’s that stench of failure that feels distinctly English, too. Slow Horses revolves around the dregs of MI5, or the secret agents lacking the renegade panache of 007, or even the raw sexual magnetism of Austin Powers. After a training exercise at Stansted Airport goes awry, nascent spook River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is dumped in a grubby office block called Slough House as punishment. There, espionage grunt work is taken care of under the semi-watchful eye of the louche Jackson Lamb ( Gary Oldman ), who serves as an intermediary between his “donkeys” and the “grown-up spies” barked at by MI5 boss Diana Taverner ( Kristin Scott Thomas ).

Cheered on by his grandfather, a veteran agent played with twinkly shrewdness by Jonathan Pryce, River decides to intercept the cases he’s expected to just ferry along. Soon a conspiracy emerges involving a far-right terrorist group, the media establishment and potentially River’s superiors.

Based on a series of novels by Mick Herron, Slow Horses has been adapted for TV by comedian Will Smith, whose previous work includes The Thick of It and Veep . There’s a sliver of familiar comic apathy that runs through it as a result; characters seem to speak in sighs, offsetting serious subject matter with dry wit. Unexpectedly, it all meshes well: the show never veers too far into levity as to overpower the drama, and vice versa.

If the terrorist plotting feels dated at times – its approach to white nationalism and terrorist blackmail feel deeply mid-Noughties, right around the time Herron began writing his Slough House series – there’s enough elsewhere to make up for it. Principally, the show’s stars, with Oldman and Scott Thomas a particularly fizzy double act. With their grumpy nonchalance and old-school glamour, they almost make you proud to be British.

‘Slow Horses’ begins today (1 April), with episodes dropping every Friday on Apple TV+

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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.

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Slow Horses and the Dark Psychology of an Unwinnable Game

The show’s masterful fourth outing unpacks the steep cost of a trade in which people are expendable.

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Everything Slow Horses does is intentional. The Apple TV+ series about the outcasts of British intelligence is almost too taut, structured so compactly around explosions and enemy pursuits and intramural kneecappings that it practically thrums. Amid a TV landscape of saggy dramas and comedies that seem stuck in an existential k-hole, this is the rare show that moves . Which also means that when the fourth season begins with a visual of trussed-up chickens rotating on a spit—identikit bodies raised for slaughter—you can trust that it means something.

Since its debut, in April 2022, Slow Horses— based on Mick Herron ’s novels—has preoccupied itself with the theme of failure, and what it allows. The characters are burnouts and duds who’ve either messed up catastrophically at MI5 or offended the wrong person, and have ended up exiled to Slough House, a dank office far from headquarters where leaks and rats aren’t spycraft terms but very real concerns. Nicknamed the “slow horses,” and presided over by the grubby, flatulent Jackson Lamb (played by Gary Oldman), the Slough House spies consistently screw up, even when they succeed. Over the past three seasons, they’ve thwarted white-nationalist terrorists, Russian sleeper cells, heavily armed private militias, even their own MI5 counterparts. But they’ve also failed, sometimes devastatingly, to protect one another. Hovering over them at all times is the possibility of getting called back to MI5 proper, though Lamb’s spies lack the political acumen and the checkered morals to ever actually pull it off.

Read: The subversive worldview of Slow Horses

Power is a bleak force in this world, and it’s never been a bleaker one than in the fourth season, a propulsive, nervy trip into the nature of authority, heritage, and care. In its early scenes, a bomb goes off at a shopping center—a terrorist act with minimal leads that sends MI5 scrambling and sets its leaders on edge. The glacial, ruthless Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) has been nudged aside as acting First Desk by the smarmy Claude Whelan (James Callis). At Slough House, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is worried about his grandfather David (Jonathan Pryce), a former senior official of MI5 whose dementia seems to be getting worse. The slow horses also have two new colleagues: Moira Tregorian (Joanna Scanlan), a cheerful schoolmarm-type who makes the fatal mistake of cleaning Lamb’s office, and J. K. Coe (Tom Brooke), a hoodie-wearing shadow who drums his fingers incessantly but doesn’t say a word. As the centers of gravity shift and realign, the potential for ruthlessness and betrayal seems higher than ever, especially as old secrets surface.

To Taverner’s chagrin, an enterprising associate at MI5 manages to tie the shopping-center attack to one of the intelligence service’s “cold bodies,” or personas that MI5 creates in case agents require new identities. Meanwhile, someone seems to be targeting David Cartwright, whose unraveling sense of reality is hard to detach from his paranoid feeling that he’s being followed. Cartwright’s nickname among spies and even his own grandson is “O.B.,” or “Old Bastard,” and his prominence in Season 4 signals the extent to which the show is thinking about legacy, particularly when a new character (Hugo Weaving) emerges as his inversion. MI5, on the show, is a place where the fish rots from the head down—where diligent agents are burned, shunted out, and scapegoated by grasping, egotistical snakes. How, the series wonders, did it get that way? When and why did the mission change from protecting others to covering your own back?

Whelan, an unctuous suit who’s never worked in the field and whose winning pitch for leading MI5 involved a “triple-A promise” to “activate accountability and accessibility,” immediately passes down the dirty work of getting things done to Taverner. (When the pair meet for a briefing on the top deck of London bus, a prominent ad slyly sells an exhibition dedicated to “Great Leaders: 500 Years of Defining Authority.”) Both contrast delightfully with Lamb, who fails at every aspect of contemporary management by verbally abusing his team, drinking on the job, and making suggestive comments to any woman he encounters. But he also operates according to his own implacable code: protecting agents who are out in the field, refusing to blow their cover, and insisting stubbornly that they’re not bodies to be sacrificed or pawns in someone’s strategic chess game. “Not in front of the kids,” he tells an asset at one point, ever the father figure to these misfit spies.

The characters in Slow Horses , Lamb among them, can sometimes feel like daffy sitcom archetypes that have been air-dropped into a Michael Bay movie. In moments of excruciating tension, when they’re being pursued by trained killers or someone has pulled the pin out of a grenade, they fumble and panic and flail. But they’re also so compelling that I occasionally craved less action and more backstory—fewer knife-edge car chases and more biographical texture. Season 4 delivers on all counts regarding River, who in the past has felt like the show’s normie conduit into the warped world of Slough House, the bland foil to Lamb’s layered grotesque. This season gives River more texture and more to do, allowing Lowden to explore the character’s empathy and demonstrate his sometimes terrifying competence in the field (and his very amateurish French—this being Slow Horses , any display of faculty or skill must immediately be undercut by humiliation).

To its credit, the show manages to do a lot in six episodes: shocking detonations and frantic, drumbeat-scored fight sequences, but also expansive storytelling, detailed worldbuilding, and considered study of what working in intelligence does to people. Some characters (Coe) seem hopelessly traumatized; some (Lamb and the archivist Molly Doran) insulate themselves from damage by shutting everyone out; others (Taverner) have become so cynical that they’ve lost their humanity. The close study of humans, so crucial to espionage, is just as vital to the spy drama. Slow Horses is thrilling, often improbably so. (If this many explosions and gunfights actually occurred in London on a daily basis, the government would have fallen long ago.) But it’s also keenly attuned to the dynamics and psychology of the trade—what it means to understand people as expendable pieces in an unwinnable game.

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Spy Series ‘Slow Horses’ Returns for Its Fourth Season in all its Sweary Glory

The series, which adapts Mick Herron’s bestselling novels about a group of intelligence agents exiled to a low-rent office, is full of typically spiky dialogue.

Gary Oldman in 'Slow Horses' season 4 now streaming on Apple TV+.

Returning for its fourth season with one episode on September 4th, ‘ Slow Horses ’ continues to prove itself as one of the best series on offer via the Apple TV+ service.

In fact, Apple has clearly been so happy with the viewership of the show, and so willing to future-proof the availability of its cast, that it has been shooting two seasons at once. A fifth is already in the works, and the start of the fourth indicates that it has lost none of the unpredictable, grungy and satisfyingly British style that fans have come to enjoy.

‘Slow Horses’ Season 4: Script and Direction

(L to R) Ruth Bradley and Gary Oldman in 'Slow Horses' season 4 now streaming on Apple TV+.

Led by Will Smith (a writer and former stand-up with experience on Armando Iannucci ’s shows, not the movie star), the series’ writing team is always on point, using Mick Herron’s novels as a starting point for the basic structure of each season and then expanding from there, but always in organic fashion.

It may not always be as action-packed as other shows (though it certainly has its moments –– witness the traumatic bomb attack that opens this season), when you have dialogue that crackles like this, you don’t need every space to be filled with someone waving a gun. And in the mouths of Oldman and the rest of the game cast, it’s always guaranteed to make you laugh or gasp… sometimes at the same time.

On the visual side of things, the show benefits from having both a more limited number of episodes per season (usually six) and one director through the whole batch, meaning that the show –– also thanks to a hefty budget from Apple –– ends up looking like a movie cut into TV-sized chunks. The environs of Slough House, the low-rent office where Lamb and co. are based, are wonderfully scruffy and evocative, in stark contrast to the polished glass and cold concrete of MI5’s main Regent’s Park HQ.

And the show uses London’s variety of landscapes and neighborhoods, plus other areas in the UK, to great effect. In Season’s 4 case, the man in charge of the show’s look is Adam Randall, who fits in well with the overall style.

‘Slow Horses’ Season 4: Performances

Oldman might rightfully score the lion’s share of the plaudits, but there is a wider ensemble all putting in great performances.

Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb

Oldman has repeatedly said that he’s having the time of his life playing the grumpy, cynical and endlessly mucky head of Slough House, and that energy seeps out of every pore. The vanity-free performance (Lamb is frequently seen with lanky hair, grease stains and mismatched clothing), is a truly memorable one, the slovenly appearance the perfect camouflage for a truly inspired spy mind.

Jack Lowden as River Cartwright

Jack Lowden in 'Slow Horses' season 4 now streaming on Apple TV+.

While he was the audience surrogate character at the start, the young agent banished to Slough House after a training mission goes wrong, River has grown into a great sidekick for Lamb, and an impressive character in his own right. And Lowden brings a superb blend of world-weariness and enthusiasm to the role.

Jonathan Pryce as David Cartwright

Jonathan Pryce in 'Slow Horses' season 4 now streaming on Apple TV+.

Though the elder Cartwright has mostly been a supporting character in earlier seasons, it’s easy to see why Smith chose an experienced thespian like Pryce to play him; because he knew that David would become much more important down the line. And Pryce brings a potent combo of wise elder former agent and humbled aging grandfather to the part, which expands here.

Kristin Scott Thomas as Diana Taverner

Kristin Scott Thomas in 'Slow Horses' season 4 now streaming on Apple TV+.

Few people can do withering putdowns like Thomas, and in Taverner, she’s found the ideal outlet. A canny, ice-cold professional, she’s forever frustrated by the hapless government types she’s forced to deal with. And her endlessly watchable interactions with Oldman are often a highlight of each season.

Other notable characters

(L to R) Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Christopher Chung, Tom Brooke, Kadiff Kirwan and Rosalind Eleazar in 'Slow Horses' season 4 now streaming on Apple TV+.

The rest of the Slough House ensemble all get their moments in the sun, and this fourth season includes a healthy influx of new characters (since in this show, a long life expectancy is never guaranteed). Highlights of the new episodes include Joanna Scanlan (like showrunner Smith, a veteran of Armando Iannucci’s shows) as the eager-to-please Moira and Tom Brooke as JK, a mysterious and honestly weird fresh addition to the office. And not forgetting James Callis as Claude Whelan, the nervous, officious new First Desk of MI5 and a great foil for Taverner.

‘Slow Horses’ Season 4: Final Thoughts

‘Slow Horses’ creative team have said they’ll happily keep making the show as long as Apple wants them to (and Mick Herron keeps writing books to adapt, with the author up to eight and counting), and that’s welcome news.

If only more series were as consistently entertaining, and this still full of steam when their fourth seasons rolled around, the TV landscape would be in much better shape.

‘Slow Horses’ Season 4 receives 8.5 out of 10 stars.

Slow Horses

What’s the story of ‘Slow Horses’ Season 4?

Adapted from Mick Herron’s ‘Slow Horses’ novel ‘Spook Street’, Season 4 opens as a bomb has exploded in a shopping center in London and MI5 is racing to figure out who is responsible. Second Desk (the second-in-command of the intelligence service) Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) must balance the demands of the investigation with effectively babysitting the nervy new First Desk (James Callis).

As for those at Slough House, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is faced with his grandfather David’s (Jonathan Pryce) increasingly fragile mental condition, compounded by a new mystery that could threaten both their lives. Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), meanwhile, is his same old, irascible self, happy to endlessly mock his team of exiled agents, but also fiercely loyal when it comes to protecting them.

And he’ll need to, as a face from the past has returned to cause trouble…

Who else is in the cast of ‘Slow Horses’ Season 4?

The new season’s cast also includes the returning likes of Christopher Chung , Rosalind Eleazar , Aimee-Ffion Edwards , Saskia Reeves and Kadiff Kirwan , along with new recruits Joanna Scanlan, Tom Brooke and Hugo Weaving .

Hugo Weaving in 'Slow Horses' season 4 now streaming on Apple TV+.

Movies Similar to 'Slow Horses':

' The Avengers ' (1998)
' RED ' (2010)
' Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ' (2011)
' Skyfall ' (2012)
' The Sweeney ' (2013)
' Spy ' (2015)
' Kingsman: The Secret Service ' (2015)
' The Man from U.N.C.L.E .' (2015)
‘ The Gray Man ' (2022)
' Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre ' (2023)

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This Is Why Slow Horses Fans Can Breathe A Big Sigh Of Relief Ahead Of Season 4

Entertainment Editor

Slow Horses is returning for its fourth season on Apple TV+

If you devoured the last season of Slow Horses and were left pondering how it could ever be topped, we’re got some news we think you’re going to like.

The fourth season of the Apple TV+ spy thriller will begin streaming on Wednesday – and all signs point to it being the strongest yet.

So much so, in fact, that at the time of writing it currently holds an enviable 100% score on the reviews site Rotten Tomatoes (admittedly, we’ll see how long that lasts, there’s always one who likes to spoil the fun, isn’t there?).

Before you dive into the new batch of episodes, check out what some of the early reviews are saying below…

Radio Times (4/5)

“ While The Morning Show may be slightly better-known with a starrier cast, and Ted Lasso may command a more excitable fanbase, Slow Horses really is giving them a run for their money as the jewel in the crown for Apple TV+ [...] There’s a simple reason why – it really is very, consistently good. The stories are stunningly well-adapted, the cast are superb, the action is thrilling and the pacing is impressive and tight.”

Empire (4/5)

“At six lean, filler-free episodes, this magnificent ride is over far, far too soon. But while it lasts, this is likely the most fun you’ll have in front of the box all year.”

Evening Standard (5/5)

“Slow Horses is not just one of the great British spy shows of recent years, it’s one of the great shows to come out of Britain full stop. And series four delivers more of the same: a fully realised world, superb script, a stellar cast all at the top of their game and a lot of great action.”

Digital Spy (5/5)

“For a show predicated on its slowness, it ushers in new characters with such paced skill, it hasn’t lost us as certain favourites head out into the cold.”

“ Jackson Lamb, our trenchcoat-wearing son of a bitch, is familiar and original, an antihero who is the only good Joe in all of Blighty. And the character works because a veteran like [Gary] Oldman is throwing his considerable talents into the role. Whatever Apple is paying him – well, it’s probably enough, but he’s cooking with fire and is worth every penny.”

Jack Lowden is also returning for the fourth series of Slow Horses

“It’s clear that Slow Horses is showing no signs of slowing down, delivering yet another charming and compelling season. It remains one of the best shows on TV right now and it’s quite frankly a crime it is still so underseen. But with a fifth season already filming, if you haven’t visited Slough House yourself yet, now is the time to do so.”

“If Slow Horses keeps operating at this level for the rest of its run (it’s been renewed through season five thus far, though there are more novels in the series), it won’t just be a serious awards contender, but potentially one of the best shows of the decade.”

Collider (8/10)

“Quite a few of the slow horses are often unfortunately sidelined here, a feeling that’s inescapably highlighted every time we revisit the team, but it remains a great season overall with some stellar surprises for new and returning viewers alike.”

The fourth season of Slow Horses arrives on Apple TV+ on Wednesday. Watch the trailer below:

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Book Review: Slow Horses, Mick Herron
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.
Slow Horses (Slough House, #1) by Mick Herron
Slow Horses is the first book in a British spy thriller series by Mick Herron, featuring a team of MI5 agents who have screwed up and are relegated to Slough House. The novel follows River Cartwright, who tries to redeem himself by investigating a kidnapping case, while facing his own demons and betrayals.
'Slow Horses' review: A gleefully corrosive vision of British ...
'Slow Horses' review: A gleefully corrosive vision of British ...
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 ...
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 ...
Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?
Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?
Slow Horses
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...
Slough House novels by Mick Herron, the basis for Slow Horses
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 ...
'Slow Horses' Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Failure
'Slow Horses' Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Failure
I Read Mick Herron's SLOW HORSES (Slough House #1)
River is handsome, capable, smart, but while in pursuit of a terrorist in the London tube, he "mistook" the suspect, tackled the wrong person and let the Tube blow up with myriad passengers. Truly, River is "in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes.". But Lamb, River, and the rest of the slow horses, because the spook world is one of ...
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 ...
Slow Horses is an old-school British spy thriller done right
Slow Horses is a six-episode espionage series based on Mick Herron's novels, starring Gary Oldman as a cynical MI5 agent. The show is a classic and realistic thriller that follows a kidnapping ...
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 ...
Denise Mullins's review of Slow Horses
5/5: If you're a fan of Fleming's suavely unflappable James Bond or Le Carre's inimitable spymaster George Smiley, be prepared to meet their antithesis in the MI5 world of the Slow Horses. Comprised of the most inept, disgraced, flawed agents of Regent Street, Jackson Lamb's staff is relegated to mindless busy work until they unwittingly stumble upon some information relevent to a domestic ...
Book Review: SLOW HORSES by Mick Herron
SLOW HORSES is a spy novel that features a group of misfits and outcasts who work for MI5 in Slough House. The book is witty, observant, and intricate, but not action-packed or glamorous.
The complete guide to Mick Herron's Slough House series
Learn about the characters, plots and themes of the Slough House series by Mick Herron, featuring Jackson Lamb and his misfit spies. The books are best read in order, from Slow Horses to Spook Street, to follow the underdog stories and meta-plots.
Slow Horses by Mick Herron, a Mysterious Review
Slow Horses is a little slow to start and uneven in places, but as a suspense novel, overall it is a good one. Special thanks to guest reviewer Betty of The Betz Review for contributing her review of Slow Horses. Acknowledgment: Soho Press provided a copy of Slow Horses for this review. Selected reviews of other mysteries by this author ….
How To Read the Slough House (Slow Horses) Books in Order
How To Read the Slough House Books in Order Book 1: Slow Horses. Slow Horses is the first book in the series and is the basis for the first season of the TV show. The novel does an excellent job ...
Why You Should Read the 'Slow Horses' Books While You Watch the ...
Here, a guide to reading the Slow Horses books in order: Slow Horses. Herron introduces readers to Slough House, the dilapidated London building where problematic MI5 agents (called "slow horses ...
Slow Horses Review
Review. Mick Herron's Slow Horses, first published in 2010, was short-listed for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. He went one better with the publication of Dead Lions in 2013, winning the prestigious CWA Gold Dagger Award. It is not surprising that the publishers seized the opportunity offered by this success to bring out the first book ...
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 ...
Apple TV's British spy thriller Slow Horses simply delivers
Slow Horses is a fairly close adaptation of the 2010 spy novel of the same name by Mick Herron, the first in Herron's "Slough House" series about a crew of underachieving spies in MI5, the ...
Slow Horses review: Gary Oldman spy series is brilliant, grumpy and
A dark comedy about MI5 agents who fail at their jobs, Slow Horses is based on Mick Herron's novels and adapted by Will Smith. The show stars Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Jonathan Pryce ...
Mick Herron's Surprise Career as a Blockbuster Spy Novelist
Mick Herron's Surprise Career as a Blockbuster Spy Novelist
The Darkest 'Slow Horses' Season Yet
The characters in Slow Horses, Lamb among them, can sometimes feel like daffy sitcom archetypes that have been air-dropped into a Michael Bay movie. In moments of excruciating tension, when they ...
Slow Horses series 4 review: Swaggering and truly distinctive in ...
Slow Horses series 4 review: Swaggering and truly distinctive in the way that very few shows are - 4/5 Gary Oldman is impeccable, as ever, but the ensemble cast - from Kristin Scott Thomas to ...
TV Review: 'Slow Horses' Season 4
Spy Series 'Slow Horses' Returns for Its Fourth Season in all its Sweary Glory. The series, which adapts Mick Herron's bestselling novels about a group of intelligence agents exiled to a low ...
Slow Horses Season 4 Reviews: Fans Have Major Cause For Excitement
"While The Morning Show may be slightly better-known with a starrier cast, and Ted Lasso may command a more excitable fanbase, Slow Horses really is giving them a run for their money as the ...

Book Review: Slow Horses, Mick Herron

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