Reviewers who make fancy claims for genre novels tend to sound like needy show-offs or hard-of-thinking dolts. So be it: here’s mine. Anyone who tries to understand modern Britain through its fiction but overlooks Mick Herron’s satirical thrillers merits a punishment posting to the critics’ version of Slough House. That noxious midden of a building opposite the Barbican, its leprous chambers groaning like ‘the internal organs of some giant, diseased beast’, is a sort of landfill site for failed spies. Herron first opened its flaking doors in 2010 with his novel Slow Horses.
Seven books later, his squad of borderline sociopath rejects from polite espionage has risen to the dignity of a luxury cast series on Apple TV+. But the sheer joy of Herron’s bunch of disgraced ‘weirdos and misfits’ comes not just from slyly booby-trapped plots and venom-tipped character drawing.
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