The topical bite of the books has sharpened. “Joe Country”, just published, feels like the bleakest volume yet
comic thrillers about failed spies may seem an unlikely source of insight into modern Britain. And, in fact, Mick Herron’s six novels about a fictitious dumping-ground for errant British agents called Slough House do not aspire to documentary realism. “Authenticity is not what I’m seeking,” the author says, in a museum café near his home in Oxford. “Plausibility and broad-stroke reality is what I’m after.” Yet, in their gleefully shocking way, his books reflect the trajectory of the nation.
Yet few contemporary British writers possess keener antennae for the background hum of public affairs. Drily, Mr Herron notes that “the political chaos we’ve entered is playing nicely into the books I’ve written.” In the latest, the just-published “Joe Country”, Diana Taverner—the Machiavellian chief of Mr Herron’s fictionalised version of, Britain’s domestic security service—considers: “If you want your enemy to fail, give him something important to do.
He leavens this sardonic disenchantment with a dark seam of comedy, in meticulously sculpted prose. He is “a master of timing, word by word, sentence by sentence,” says Andrew Taylor, a crime novelist. “His language creates its own world, with streaks of satire and loss.” In a solemn genre, “it’s refreshing to find a series that makes you regularly laugh out loud.
Looming over each twisting plot is Jackson Lamb, the scruffy and flatulent Falstaff of the undercover world. This dinosaur spook, once based in Berlin, runs his “crew of misfits” with a heavy yet protective hand. An “overweight, greasy has-been”, Lamb is a grotesque and a flawed champion. Mr Herron stresses that “I’m not into wish-fulfilment. I don’t think a bunch of heroes will save society.” Lamb, though, will cross almost any line to save his own agents.
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