Wearing Le Carre's Mantle

Or Mick Herron as a full time "joe" in Le Carre land

Psst. I have a deal for you. A UK bookseller is offering a set of signed first editions of the Mick Herron  “Slough House” spy novels (or at least the first eight—it has been joined by a ninth novel, published in 2023). Price US $4980.31

If you think that is steep, check out auction house records for a set of the Ian Fleming Bond novels—never mind signed versions.  A UK auction house hit a record in 2019 when it sold a set of Fleming novels for the equivalent of $160,000 Canadian.

But I am being crass. The point is that Mick Herron has achieved rapid stature over the last decade as a spy novelist. Maybe his spy novels will never achieve the collector prices commanded by Fleming, but maybe salt away your first editions (with pristine dust jackets) and try to get ahold of some signed copies.  (Hey, I have a signed copy, addressed to me, of Bad Actors, but alas it is a paperback).  As your literary investment grows, here is what you are watching. Mick Herron, a man very unlike John le Carre, except in country of birth, now wears the mantle of the 20^th century’s greatest spy novelist, a writer who turned the Cold War spy novel into a genre all his own.

The Le Carre mantle is more than name recognition, sales, just jacket blurbs. It is, I would argue, about what makes spy fiction tick. Le Carre was driven from the beginning to write anti-James Bond novels, with the triumphal The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his enduring model, even before the character of Smiley really occurred to him. Le Carre  dispensed with the Fleming formula of fast cars, high living, expendable girfriends, outlandish crackpot villains--all erased. The spy genre that le Carre stole away from Fleming, operated elsewhere, in a land of machiavellian politics, bureaucratic warfare, and bruised morality. The Cold War was everywhere, the spies were at the heart of it, but what really counted was the personal moral landscape of espionage’s actors, on both sides of the Wall.  Try and find a personal moral landscape in Fleming’s Bond—good luck to you.

Alec Leamas’ epiphany on the Berlin Wall in the final scene of The Spy who Came in from the Cold, would be repeated in endless but always creative ways by Le Carre. He made the spy novel ask—what matters? Where is the world’s moral compass? What a strange demand to make of the spy novel.

Now Mick Herron has come along. He wasn’t Le Carre reincarnated at first. He had no personal knowledge of the spy world, no twisted family history. What got him started on spy novels was the London terrorist bombings on July 7, 2005 (the “7/7” bombings). His Britain is post-post Imperial. It is grubby and soiled and soon staggering from Brexit, with his fictional MI5 desperately trying not to go down with the ship.  Herron’s “Slough House” is an outcast office, full of losers, run by a boss, Jackson Lamb, who is a kind of homeless (his home is his rubbish-strewn office), gross counterpart to George Smiley, on the skids. It all began as a funny conceit, ribald and entertaining. Full of farts. In a brilliant interview essay on Herron, the Harvard historian, Jill Lepore, calls Lamb “Rabelesian.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/is-mick-herron-the-best-spy-novelist-of-his-generation

But along the way, from the first novel in the series, Slow Horses, published (with difficulty) in 2010, to the most recent, The Secret Hours, published in 2023, the spirit of Le Carre, who Herron read when young,  began to infuse Herron’s characters.  Spying as a morality tale, infused with tragedy, breathed new life into Herron’s novels and allowed him to escape the trap of the serial writer, fast but formulaic.

I confess I have found every one of Herron’s spy novels a good read. But The Secret Hours is his best by far. I will give nothing away, beyond saying that the novel revolves around backstories told of two Slough House characters, Jackson Lamb, boss of the “slow horses” and Molly Doran, MI5’s archivist who navigates her top secret document lair in a wheel chair after losing both her legs. The back stories are brilliantly told but where it becomes clear that Herron is now a full time “joe” in Le Carre land is at the very end of the novel.

Compare it to the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Leamas sees something of his past that he must hold on to. So does Lamb (work name Brinsley Miles) in the final passage of The Secret Hours.

If you read The Secret Hours slowly enough you might just conclude it in time to revel in the third season of Slow Horses on Apple TV. The release date is December 1. Gary Oldman is hands-down brilliant as Jackson Lamb.  If you read faster than that and somehow have not watched all of Seasons One and Two, there is your chance.

One last thing, in case you are in for a bit of book sleuthing but don’t fancy a career as a collector of Herron or Fleming or Le Carre first editions, you could always try your hand at finding a mint copy of Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence (Frank Cass—no longer exists, 1991). You’ll find, if you find, my effort to make sense long ago of the real work of spy fiction.