Slough House - the first four

This isn’t intended as a put down, but I’ve now read four of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels and I’m trying to work out what’s made them so popular. What’s the attraction?

Some reviewers are calling him the new John Le Carré, but I don’t think that’s quite right: he’s less rigorous, less ‘literary’ than Le Carré. He’s also an awful lot funnier. Or he’s the new Len Deighton. But I don’t think that fits either: Deighton could be funny, but his spy novels – the ones I’ve read, at least – had impenetrable plots, dialed the action down and the anti-romanticism way, WAY up.

I think it’s this. Slough House is filled with Secret Service rejects, agents who’ve all made a career-killing mistake and who’ve been shuffled off to this dead end in the hope that they won’t be able to take the boredom and will resign. (The Secret Service, apparently, never fires anyone.) Presiding over them all is Jackson Lamb, a rude, chain-smoking, whiskey-swilling, virulently anti-PC slob who shows nobody mercy and never, ever hands out a compliment.

But his agents struggle on, convinced that somehow they’ll be the exception to the rule and make it back into the Secret Service’s good books. Because even though they’ve been dubbed failures, they’re not. They might have made mistakes but they’re not stupid and they always manage to rise to the occasion when they need to. Even if Jackson Lamb is smarter than the lot of them put together and always ten steps ahead of everyone.

He’s the unforgiving boss. His agents are the unappreciated office drones slaving away at boring assignments in cramped, draughty offices and drowning their sorrows with sex, drugs, drink or gambling. Anything to dim the pain. That may not apply to everyone, but I’m willing to bet most of us would like the chance to prove we can do so much better – to an organization that seems to have forgotten us. The Slough House stories are office life – but with guns, car chases and hand-to-hand combat to liven up the drudgery.

Anyway, I’m hooked, and I’ve just put in an order for the other four books I don’t own. Can’t wait.