https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/slow-horses-mick-herron ( )

"You know what?" Hassan said. "You make me ashamed I'm British."

That line speaks volumes.

I was fortunate enough to pick up a copy of Mick Herron's Real Tigers earlier this year, and I say fortunate because I was completely unaware of the author and I absolutely loved the book. So when I recently found Slow Horses (2010) it definitely made my day.

Mine is a Tenth Anniversary copy (2020), and the preface is interesting in itself. It briefly covers the inspiration for and / or the circumstances that conspired to create Slough House, and the events leading Herron to switch gears in his writing genre and to undertake more global political and unpleasant criminal themes like terrorism (yes, beheadings are extremely hardcore). It also mentions the pushback he got after he wrote this story:

"My original UK publisher took exception to the book; he thought its plot strand concerning the resurgence of the far right ridiculously unlikely, and references to, for instance, Britain leaving the European Union revealed how out of touch I was with contemporary politics. I, on the other hand, thought I'd found my own voice at last; not entirely different from the one I'd developed in the earlier books, but more confident, more individual. Being dropped by that publisher shortly after Slow Horses appeared wasn't the most auspicious of starts, but I felt at last that I was ready."

Funny that, since Fascism and the so-called "far-right" (or simply political right) has always been hiding in plain sight. In most places the far-right has largely been the sole power structure and authority held in place by its ardent supporters. The far-right has always controlled the message, and any failures to see the obvious is the fault of the viewer which is mostly due to holding a full set of false beliefs (hence, the message). I do like that the far-right is more mainstream and out of the shadows, I like that we now have facts (for the political center and so-called "left") and alternative-facts.

[Hard to believe, but the Hippies don't really run Canary Wharf, the Square Mile, or Lombard Street. They don't even run Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds or NatWest. Nor do they control UBS and Credit Suisse. The Hippies don't even control the Giant Media Conglomerates. Crazy, I know, but it’s true!]

Mick Herron’s writing is superb and sublime. There will be passages that say next to nothing, where you have to literally read between the lines, and I'll be like... huh, what? I will have to read the passage a couple of times before I put the pieces together and then... son of a bitch! By saying less, he was actually saying more and it's brilliant. I'm not sure how he does it, but that is real genius.

I love all the characters in Slough House. I also like smart people. I really, really like smart people... maybe because they are in such short supply. And I love the idea of Slough House, a crew of misfits that are polar opposites of the "London Rules" wonks overpopulating Regent's Park. How on any given day, with fewer tools and resources, the Slow Horses can run circles around their more upstanding counterparts. Black sheep, slow horses, whatever, I'll take them any day. ( )

Takes awhile to get rolling & setting up the whole cast, but pays off by the end ( )

I like a good spy thriller from time to time. Usually the ones I've read have dealt with the Cold War times but this one is more contemporary. I gather this series has now been made for streaming TV which accounts for its popularity in my local library. I see it is available through Hoopla so maybe this will be our evening viewing.

Who knew that MI5 housed its lackluster spies in a special division? That's what Slough House is and the men and women who operate out of it are the Slow Horses. River Cartwright doesn't feel like he belongs at Slough House because the operation he botched (which was a training exercise) resulted from incorrect information from another operative. However, his boss, Jackson Lamb, tells him he was lucky not to be outright dismissed and it's only due to the fact that his grandfather was a master spy in his time. All of the operatives at Slough House just want to get back into doing real spy work. Spending a rainy night outside of a journalist's flat waiting for him to put out his trash doesn't quite qualify as that for River. At the same time, his office mate, Catherine Standish, gets a real job stealing data from that same journalist's thumb drive without him catching on. River is jealous and determined to find out why the journalist has been targeted. Then, events in Britain take a horrific turn when a young Muslim man in kidnapped in Leeds and his kidnappers threaten to cut off his head on a streaming platform. All hands are needed to look for clues as to where the hostage is being held, even those at Slough House. They do a suprisingly good job arriving at the house where he was held just minutes after the captors were warned (by a mole in MI5) they had to abandon their safe house. When the Slough House group arrive they find a decapitated head on the kitchen table but it's not the hostage, it's a MI5 operative who had been under cover with the group. River thinks he looks familiar but their time at Slough House never overlapped. Where has he seen him before? When he remembers the revelation will shake up the highest levels of MI5.

This book was written before the Brexit vote but seems to have predicted that time of British isolationism. Now what else will Mick Herron prognosticate? ( )

Very entertaining, downbeat spy story. Reminiscent of early Le Carrés. Got a little bit too cute at times, especially toward the end. Also relied too much on "and then [character] sees something that [somethinged] their mind" at the end of a chapter, which is not revealed for an other couple of chapters. That feels a little bit cheap. But I'm putting those issues down to it being a first novel, and hope that'll smooth out in future. Gonna read more. ( )