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No Jackson Lamb, but still a big stink in Mick Herron’s new spy novel

By Sue Turnbull

September 29, 2023 — 4.00pm

FICTION
The Secret Hours
Mick Herron
Baskerville, $32.99

“The worst smell in the world is a dead badger.” It’s quite a first line, but then Mick Herron has always specialised in attention-grabbing openings, especially when they involve the inhabitants of Slough House, the fictional home of the sidelined Secret Service operatives that inhabit his spy thrillers, recently brought to life in the beautifully realised TV series, Slow Horses.

Although The Secret Hours isn’t set in Slough House, it overlaps with that world in terms of some of the characters whose identities are secret, including the aptly named First Desk who heads up The Park, but also because of the bleak ambience and black humour. Herron has always been more interested in the tragicomedy of failure, incompetence and stupidity than he is in success.

Mick Herron is back with a standalone novel about spies that overlaps with his Slough House books.

Mick Herron is back with a standalone novel about spies that overlaps with his Slough House books.Credit: Alamy

For readers already familiar with the Slough House series, there are what the author has described in fan parlance as “Easter Eggs” to discover. For newbies, this is an excellent opportunity to acquaint yourself with the brilliance that is Herron in full flight as he revels in the inanity of the office politics that have blighted British bureaucracy, from the buffoonery of sitting prime ministers to whichever branch of the Secret Service Herron is actually lampooning. We’re a long way from John le Carre here.

But back to the dead badger as discovered by Max Janacek, purportedly a retired academic “still footling around with a history book”. Woken by an intruder in his cottage, Max defends himself with a poker in ways that suggest another set of skills entirely. After leading his pursuers on a merry chase along the green lanes of Devon, in which the dead badger inevitably plays a role, Max makes his escape via the long-established emergency exit every good ex-spy should have.

Cut to part two, and the Monochrome Inquiry set up to investigate presumed misdemeanours in the intelligence service. Designed to fail, it is led by Griselda Fleet, a black woman in her 50s struggling to pay off the acquired debts of her profligate ex-husband. Her assistant is the anxious and chagrined Malcolm Kyle, who has come to realise that their project was doomed from the start.

Until, that is, someone hides a top-secret file from the archives under the fishcakes in Malcolm’s supermarket trolley and the game is on: “Monochrome, the creaky, thwarted inquiry with all the forward momentum of a slapped moth, had just gone live.”

Just how Max, and everyone else we encounter, is connected to this file will be the work of a labyrinthine narrative that starts in the now but returns to Berlin in the 1990s, then affectionately known as “The Spooks Zoo”, following the fall of the wall. The point being, as Herron archly notes, that as in a zoo, all the animals are “on display”.

There are spies and more spies, but just who is spying on whom and why? Nothing and no one are quite what they seem. This is Herron at his most absurd and trenchant best.

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