Book – Slow Horses

Author: Mick Herron
Publisher: Baskerville, an imprint of John Murray
Reviewer: Stephen Keim

Slow Horses was chosen as the book to read by the Blokes Book Club which is why I came to be reading it. Spy novels are not, normally, my go.

Mick Herron has an impressive collection of titles to his name and Slow Horses is his 2010 contribution to his Slough House series of spy novels.

Slough House, the omniscient narrator points out, is not in Slough but in the Borough of Finsbury, a stone’s throw from Barbican Underground Station. It is a place where spies who have failed or offended or otherwise fallen from favour with those who count at the moment are sent to perform meaningless jobs until slow reality hits them and they leave the service for meaningless jobs in private enterprise. The name comes from an obscure joke based on the concept that a banished person is so far from the corridors of power that they might as well be in Slough which is 31 kilometres west of Central London (which, in corridors of power terms, is a long way).

The plot centres around River Cartwright whose reason for being banished has something to do with his best friend and cohort competitor, “Spider” Webb, and a lot to do with Cartwright failing an exercise in which he was tasked with saving London from a saboteur dressed in something approaching a white tee under a blue shirt.

Discussing the plot of a spy novel in any detail is not recommended as even the most anodyne fact might, in the end, give the game away. Suffice to say that the spy industry recalls Churchill’s famous statement that, in Parliament, those across the table are the opposition and not the enemy and that the enemy sit in the seats behind your back.

And, in a crisis, the people you have written off can surprise you such that an effective team can arise from the most unlikely components.

I have hesitated to use the word, “thriller”, to this point of time in this review but Slow Horses is indeed a thriller. The suspense is maintained to the final pages and, in the second half of the novel, once the stage has been set, surprises lurk around every corner. Time and again, the reader thinks that they have worked out what was a previously unlikely situation only to have new details revealed which change the reader’s working hypothesis, dramatically.

Slow Horses is not just a who done it. How was it done and who did which bits are just as important. And to add spice and immediacy, not all the double crossing and betrayal is, necessarily, in the reader’s past as the narrator brings protagonists who are doing one another over to negotiate, make demands and clinch new deals so that new betrayals can emerge from the text before the reader’s eyes.     

I found Slow Horses entertaining and satisfying.

I may even dip into another spy novel sometime in the foreseeable future.