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.
