I have just finished reading Len Deighton’s spy trilogy Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match. Immensely enjoyable but when I started, it was with a sense of nostalgia for all that Cold War stuff. Now two things have happened.
A Russian double agent, his daughter and a passing policeman have life threatening injuries from a nerve gas administered in the sleepy city of Salisbury. This is massively Len Deighton where, in unexpected bursts of action, innocent bystanders are killed with abandon by the author. In Mexico Set a Russian agent is persuaded to defect and in London Match he is debriefed, to say more would be a spoiler but the similarity to events in Salisbury is marked.
I thought I would just have to re-read Deighton and le Carré over and over again like Tony Last reading Dickens in A Handful of Dust. Oh happy day, I have found Mick Herron. The sixth in his series of spy novels, London Rules, has just been published but I’m starting with Slow Horses (2010). Don’t trust me – here are some reviews:
“The fifth instalment of the award-winning Jackson Lamb series is witty, sardonic and laugh-out-loud funny yet also thrilling and thought-provoking … Herron has often been compared with spy thriller greats John le Carré and Len Deighton but it is time he was recognised in his own right as the best thriller writer in Britain today. In a series that never lets its fans down, London Rules is the best instalment yet” – Daily Express
“His books present a secret world that seems more authentic and discomfiting than le Carré’s because it resembles the world the rest of us work in … As a master of wit, satire, insight and that very English trick of disguising heartfelt writing as detached irony before launching a surprise assault on the reader’s emotions, he is difficult to overpraise” – Telegraph
“If it were ever in doubt before, London Rules confirms Mick Herron as the greatest comic writer of spy fiction in the English language, and possibly all crime fiction … he has combined the essence of perpetual humour with a background of reality. He may make us laugh on every page, but he also makes us think” – Times
“Lamb – the most fascinating and irrtesistible thriller series hero to emerge since Jack Reacher – battles two sets of enemies … Given to boozing, smoking, farting and caustic, politically incorrect wisecracking, he is a 21st century Falstaff; but also the fat knight’s antithesis, a ruthless pragmatist, and master of office power games. In London Rules he plays a blinder, and Herron does too” – Sunday Times
“Herron is a funny writer but also a serious plotter … Where Herron’s novels most overlap with those of le Carré is in the severity of their critique of the failures of management in post-imperial, pre-Brexit Britain” – Guardian
“Herron’s comic brilliance should not overshadow the fact that his books are frequently thrilling, often thought-provoking, and sometimes moving and even inspiring” – Sunday Express
“It is, as ever, a joy to return to this world: there is a warm, wise, amused depth to Herron’s writing, which shines a stark light on the atrocities he describes. He’s also horribly funny” – Observer
The critics are unsure whether to take him entirely seriously. He writes intelligent spy thrillers seasoned with a pinch of wit. The plot lines, like PG Wodehouse’s, are implausible but most ingenious and like PGW he delivers pure unputdownable pleasure.