Slough House (novel series)

This article is about Mick Herron's series of novels. For the Apple TV Series, see Slow Horses.

Slough House

10th Anniversary cover of Slow Horses
Slow Horses (2010) Dead Lions (2013) The List (2015 novella) Real Tigers (2016) Spook Street (2017) London Rules (2018) The Drop (2018 novella) Joe Country (2019) The Catch (2020 novella) The Last Dead Letter (2020 novella) Slough House (2021) Bad Actors (2022) Standing by the Wall (2022 novella)
Author	Mick Herron
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Spy fiction
Publisher	Hachette Book Group
Published	1 June 2010
No. of books	8

Slough House is a series of spy novels by the British author Mick Herron. Herron began writing the first volume, Slow Horses, in 2008, and published it in 2010.

The series follows River Cartwright and his colleagues, a group of humiliated MI5 agents, who have been relegated to paper pushing jobs. They serve under a crude ageing Cold War era agent, Jackson Lamb, and will do anything to get back into the game.

Herron's books have sold more than four million copies. They have been called a satirical, "rollicking subversion" of the stories of John le Carré.

Plot synopsis

Slough House is a deceptively named location, located not in Slough but in Islington. Appearing from the outside as an unassuming office building, Slough House is a dead end. A place where the British Intelligence service sends their rejects, failures & embarrassments in the hopes they quit or prematurely retire. The office is overseen by Jackson Lamb, an ageing agent who cut his teeth during the Cold War and resents the "Slow Horses" (disgraced agents) who end up on his doorstep.

Everyone has a reason for being at Slough House. River Cartwright was in the final stages of assessment for MI5, when he made a mistake that shut down London King's Cross railway station. Min Harper was relegated for leaving confidential information on a train, Louisa Guy lost the tail of an important suspect and Roddy Ho was cursed with an unpalatable personality. While River is desperate to get back to being a field agent, the closest Lamb will let him is searching through people's garbage.

Meanwhile, the management of MI5 at Regent's Park are bent on maintaining the service's budgets and improving its standing within society. Diana Taverner, the deputy-director, has no respect for the agents of Slough House and happily manipulates them as she sees fit, dangling the carrot of being pulled out of workplace purgatory.

Throughout the series the agents of Slough House navigate the legacies of Cold War espionage, outwit threats to national security and protect their team from higher powers in the intelligence service.

Publishing history

Slow Horses was published in the United Kingdom by Constable in 2010. The book underperformed and the publisher declined Herron's follow up book Dead Lions. Herron struggled to find another publisher, as they were reluctant to publish a sequel for a book they hadn't released, and were confused by the novel’s blend of thriller and comedy elements.

Herron's follow-up novels Dead Lions and Real Tigers were released in the United States by Soho Press. Juliet Grames, who runs the Soho Crime Imprint, was energised by Herron's writing and bought further rights for Slow Horses.

John Murray acquired the rights to release the series in the UK and released its editions of the first two books in 2015. While the release also did not initially bear fruit, the series found success after Waterstones named Slough Horses its ‘thriller of the month’ in August 2017.

In 2017, the series also found success in the US when Nancy Pearl discussed Slow Horses on NPR. Soho printed an additional 2,000 copies of the book which sold out in 24 hours; they would go on to sell 20,000 copies that month.

Herron's books have sold more than four million copies.

English Actor Seán Barrett voices the series's audiobook adaptations.

The Slough House series comprises nine novels and four novellas ordered by publication date:

Title	First published	ISBN
Slow Horses	2010	9781473674189
Dead Lions	2013	9781616952259
The List (novella)	2015	9781616957452
Real Tigers	2016	9781616956127
Spook Street	2017	9781473621299
London Rules	2018	9781473657403
The Drop (novella)	2018	9781473678309
Joe Country	2019	9781473657441
The Catch (novella)	2020	9781529331707
Slough House	2021	9781529378641
Bad Actors	2022	9781529378702
Standing By The Wall (collection)	2022	9781641295031
A collection of Slough House novellas, comprising The List, The Drop, The Catch, The Last Dead Letter, and Standing by the Wall.
Clown Town	2025	9781399800433

Inspiration and writing

Genre

Herron has a broad range of influences from John le Carré, Len Deighton, Charles Dickens to Reginald Hill and P. G. Wodehouse. Herron began reading le Carré at the age of 14 and stated he "gave me permission to become a writer ... he showed me you could invent an entire world, invent its language too". Herron stated that le Carré's A Perfect Spy was the only "masterpiece" by one of his influences that he was able to read as a newly-released publication.

Herron has cited Reginald Hill's Andy Dalziel and John Finnemore's First Officer Douglas Richardson as character influences for Jackson Lamb. While Herron has denied intentionally making Lamb's name a homage to le Carré, the character's initials "J. Lamb" appear in Smiley's People.

Writing Style

While many of England's renowned espionage writers like le Carré and Ian Fleming had previously been members of the Secret Service, Herron has no military or intelligence experience. Instead, he draws heavily in his writing from experiences while working in the legal department of an employment issues research firm. The specific details about the Secret Service throughout his novels are fabrications.

Herron assumes the Secret Service operates like any other workplace where "people are often doing quite dull jobs and working with other people who they don’t necessarily like, with a lot of office politics going on". The Sydney Morning Herald's Sue Turnbull described Herron as being in "full flight", when he "revels in the inanity of the office politics that have blighted British bureaucracy".

Herron has discussed the importance of each novel having a different tone, colouring and mood. He allows his writing to be driven by character decisions, rather than strict plots. His rough outlines amount to a "series of disconnected events" with plot twists usually occurring when he needs to write himself out of a corner. Herron also refrains from creating extensive character backstories.

Herron writes in the third person and will often rotate points of view within the same scene. Glenn Harper from the Los Angeles Review of Books writes that Herron's sudden changes in perspective allow for "sudden and often funny revelations, when the false impression given by one point of view is clarified in a later episode or an alternative point of view".

While writing, Herron refrains from visualising the characters. He maintains "a vague sense of my eye on the page rather than a process in my head. It’s more about the rhythm of the sentences". Herron credits the development of his writing style to early experiences writing poetry.

Herron views thematic patterning as an essential narrative glue within his work. Mortality, addiction and ancestral sin have been noted as themes throughout the series.

Several of the series's characters and events derive from contemporary history. The novel Slough House finds its roots in the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, while The Catch has drawn comparisons to events of the life of Jeffrey Epstein. British politician Boris Johnson has also been noted by Herron as the basis for the fictional Tory politician Peter Judd. Herron has said he is drawn to incorporating political elements into his stories as they "go hand in hand with the kind of espionage thriller I’m interested in. I don’t want to write a big, plotted, evil-mastermind spy novel; I’m interested in incompetence, things going wrong, badly motivated stuff, and that’s essentially our political reality now."

Background

In 2005, Herron was commuting to work when a series of bombs exploded around London. The experience caused Herron to shift from writing detective to spy fiction. While he did not feel qualified to write about world events, the bombings made him realise “to be on the front line, you just have to be in a city. Suddenly, everywhere seems to be a viable target. So that opened the door and allowed me to write about such things.” Herron would later reference the morning during a scene in Slow Horses, where River Cartwright reflects:

People talked about that day in different ways. Either it was a story about them in which bombs happened, or it was a story about the bombs, and they’d just happened to be there.

Herron began writing the first novel in the series, Slow Horses, in 2008.

Reception

Critical response

While Slow Horses book did not initially achieve mainstream success, an early review in The Booklist said Herron's novel was "filled with acidic wit and engaging misdirection... with enough suspense, double-dealing, and mayhem for thriller devotees; but it's also a wonderfully funny, farcical, deeply cynical skewering of politics, bureaucrats, turf wars, and the Great Game."

Several critics have also noted Herron's ability to structure tightly plotted stories and conjure up terrible offices and their politics. Writing in the Literary Review, Sam Leith stated that Herron's novels were "one of the least well-kept secrets in espionage fiction." Leith complimented Herron's ability as a "a fine, often glorious sentence-by-sentence writer, and fiercely funny with his dialogue."

In 2018, British Author Peter Hitchens released a critique of the books (and the broader spy fiction genre) stating the series:

Seem to me to embody and accept the questionable idea that some sort of secret security service really does keep us safe, a claim I think at best unproven. And they blithely posit (and seem to excuse if not applaud) the supposed existence of cellars deep beneath the fictional Regent’s Park headquarters where something which looks and sounds a lot like torture takes place. And it’s sort of funny. Which it isn’t.

Hitchens also critiqued the book's presentation of conservative characters as closeted Nazis. He argued they are "profoundly flawed in the sort of ways left-wing persons like to imagine such people are flawed", whilst also noting the character of Robert Hobden "bears a faint resemblance to me".

The second volume, Dead Lions, won the Crime Writers' Association 2013 Gold Dagger.

Derived works

Novellas

Herron has written five spinoff novellas/short stories; The List (2015), The Marylebone Drop (2018), The Catch (2020), The Last Dead Letter (2020) and Standing by the Wall (2022).

In 2022, the stories were published in a singular print edition.

Standing by the Wall was inspired by Frank Capra's film It's a Wonderful Life.

Related Novels

Three of Herron's other novels, Reconstruction (2008), Nobody Walks (2015) and The Secret Hours (2023), whilst not officially part of the Slough House series, take place within the world and feature characters from the series.

TV series

Slow Horses is a British spy thriller television series based on the Slough House series of novels. The series premiered on Apple TV+ on 1 April 2022. The second series, Dead Lions, premiered on 2 December 2022. In June 2022, the series was renewed for a third and fourth series. The third series premiered on 29 November 2023. The fourth series is set to premiere on 4 September 2024. In January 2024, it was renewed for a fifth series, which will be based on the fifth book in the series, London Rules.