Bad Actors

There are a few things you need to know before starting a Mick Herron Slough House novel, if you have not tried one before. The central character of Jackson Lamb is totally obnoxious. He has no apparent soft edges, in fact, he has very few edges at all, as he is mostly lumpy and physically unattractive, with his hand always either down his trousers scratching something or fielding a cigarette out of some dark recess. He denigrates his team, mocks and derides everyone … but, but, but … he is brilliant. His deep unpleasantness is almost hypnotic.  

The team at Slough House are the forgotten – every one of them. They are the flotsam that has floated miserably out of the more respectable establishment of MI5 and shipped up soggily in their fetid little backwater. Each has their own dubious skill – whether it is mayhem, violence, electronic wizardry, organisation, an extra level of deviousness – but something in their DNA has let them down unforgivably in the past.

They are the millstones around Lamb’s neck, and he never lets them forget it. Newbies come and old timers wash away, and in Bad Actors there is a fresh member of the team on the scene who raises the temperature a notch. It is, like everything else, very satisfactory.

Whatever their foibles and calamitous mistakes, I root for every single one of them. I crow with delight at their successes (always unexpected), I wince at their disasters (totally expected) and long for them to come out on top.  These are definitely not top spy dogs, they are definitely underdogs – but they are OUR dogs …

Herron is funny. He is a wordsmith, and he can make ghastliness funny. His characters are mini masterpieces. Each one is defined and their own person, with their individual thought patterns and guaranteed mishap action plans. He makes political comment slyly and sharply and above all astutely.

And there is his trademark breeze that coils through London and drifts ever closer, down back streets, probing into corners, exploring the grimy bins outside the paint-flaked doorway, and on into the rooms and stairway of Slough House. Without this all-seeing soft breath so much less would be revealed.

In Bad Actors, one of the Number 10 advisors has gone missing. It is not so much the missing bit that is causing a small wrinkle, more the what-she-could-reveal about the Svengali special advisor to the PM. And he wants her found. Deniable operatives are tasked. Word reaches both sets of Joes – Slough House and the big dogs at MI5.  

Herron is without doubt the thriller readers’ writer of choice. He does in his books what no one else does, and if they did, he would still do it better.