Mick Herron’s new novel opens with a simple assertion: “The worst smell in the world is dead badger.” The poor beast itself turns up soon after, as does a “flight kit”: the stash of documents, currency and disguise kept close at hand by spies just in case. A frantically violent night-time chase through unexpectedly hostile Devon farmland quickly follows. But it is not the action, or even the tradecraft, that will reassure Herron readers that they are on secure ground with The Secret Hours, his 16th novel across 20 years. It is the stench of that badger.
Herron has become something of a laureate of decrepitude. His Slough House series features the fabled Slow Horses, British secret agents cast out to the periphery of the shadow world via an imaginatively comprehensive assortment of personal, operational, moral or other failings. In those books both the dilapidated building and its equally distressed inhabitants are subjected to a detailed physical scrutiny that doesn’t shy from matters of hygiene and odour. Most particularly in respect of Herron’s leading protagonist, Jackson Lamb, the flatulent, corpulent, unwashed leader of the Slow Horses, captured in all the spirit of his brilliance and boorishness by Gary Oldman in the Apple TV+ series.
While The Secret Hours is billed as a standalone novel, it is really more of a lean-to, or even an extension. Among the new faces there are plenty of familiar names, storylines reappear in one guise or another and the world is still populated by the joes and the dogs and the milkmen and the rest of the glossary of Herron’s Spook Street. The action revolves around an inquiry into the secret services set up a couple of years back by the then prime minister – unnamed, but who had taken a minibreak at Peppa Pig World and had a superinjunction in place relating to an “eighth or ninth’’ child: we get the gist – as an act of petty revenge for the way they had cramped his style when he had been foreign secretary. The nuts and bolts of the inquiry were facilitated by the PM’s special adviser, an “interminable” blogger with his own thoughts about the functioning of the state – again, we get the picture.
Of course, the security services are as comfortable fending off their own government as they are foreign ones, and aristocratic Whitehall operator First Desk, head of the service and veteran member of Herron’s cast, easily enough ensures the inquiry will trundle on for ever and achieve nothing. However, roll forward to the present day and while the PM may be gone – “the inevitable conclusion of his bin-fire of the vanities” – the zombie committee is sparked into activity via some fun skulduggery in a supermarket that results in the deposit of a genuinely secret file. By now some other interested parties have their own motivations for airing the file’s contents. The story that emerges stretches from Berlin in the 90s to the Cabinet table today, and casts light on one of the most sensitive cases in the security service’s history. Coincidentally, it also illuminates important myths of origin from the Herron universe that have previously been opaque or lightly sketched.
Herron’s cultivated air of default world-weariness doesn’t preclude outbreaks of icy cynicism and admirable idealism as well as a certain wry self-awareness. There are lots of references to espionage fiction, and there’s even a spy writer on the secret committee, gleefully taking notes, who has been “pegged by some as the heir to le Carré – one of an admittedly long list of legatees”, writes the primary legatee in the genre. In fact, the bulk of Herron’s jokes land well. A notoriously scruffy agent explains to a colleague his difficulty with clothes. “‘I had a leather jacket once, he said. ‘Made me look like Van Morrison.’ ‘Well, that’s not so – ’ ‘Now. Like Van Morrison looks like now.’ ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’”
Maybe the politicos are a bit on the nose and readers would have grasped that events are taking place in the present day without needing asides about kale smoothies and Wordle. But Herron obviously relishes his digs at the many real-life shambles that have played out so garishly since, say, 2016. Here he also pretty seamlessly and efficiently ventilates issues of corruption, surveillance, ownership of data, and the private sector takeover of the state, against all the ripping yarn of the espionage tale. And if there is any sense that Herron has filled in his background with broad brushstrokes, as ever he has reserved his most delicate and affecting work for his characters in the foreground. The baggage they carry, the predicaments they face, the forces that, generally, thwart them and ultimately the bonds that tie them are formed over long periods of close contact, whether in the squalid environs of Slough House or other equally dismal workplaces co-opted by the defenders of the realm. It’s always the people that really matter, and perhaps at the heart of the entire Herron project is its appreciation of “the biggest secret of all: that spies were just like everyone else, especially when you locked them in an office”.
• The Secret Hours by Mick Herron is published by Baskerville (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
