Real Tigers by Mick Herron

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Critics claim that Mick Herron is the next John Le Carré. They both write about the same world – spies, traitors and confused politics. However, Herron’s world is darker, more flippant and more acerbic that Le Carré’s.
Herron describes Slough House as the building where failed MI-5 operatives go – alcoholics, drug addicts, gamblers, screw-ups and so on. To quote the author “Nobody left Slough House at the end of a working day feeling like they’d contributed to the security of the nation. They left it feeling like their brains had been fed through a juicer.” And here’s another quote that exemplifies the boredom and futility of the ‘slow horses’ working in Slough House – “Eight and a half hours of this, minus whatever he could get away with for lunch. Five times that to make up the week, and forty-eight weeks in the working year . . . He might see this task off before his fortieth birthday, if he really hammered it. Yeah: get a wiggle on, and he could celebrate putting this to bed alongside the big four-oh. Or he could just beat himself to death with a hole punch.”
To add to the depressive tone, Herron depicts London as drab, hot, humid, in the middle of a heat wave with its trees/lawns/flowers all brown and dying. But to break the monotony of their work and the weather, one of their own, Catherine, is kidnapped on the streets of London. Although a recovering alcoholic, she is the most mature and stable member of Slough House. She is the calming influence on her boss, Jackson Lamb, an experienced, sharp, uncouth, sarcastic, dirty operative who is described as having the grace of a hippo steering a barrow.
Herron reveals a complex plot involving the power- hungry Minister for internal security, the Head of MI-5, a senior security officer and a very disgruntled pair of former army officers – all fighting an internecine war feeding off power and revenge.
Herron tells the story in a lively and amusing manner as the ‘slow horses’ speed up in pairs to find out what’s happened to Catherine and get involved in a rather banal shoot out at the and where the slow team win against all odds but as usual the rich and/or powerful carry on as if nothing has happened.
Herron is a very witty author but you have to read his prose very carefully as otherwise you might miss some of his irony and consequently the flow of the plot.

Shawn Callon, author of the Simon Montfort Spy Series, wrote this review.




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Real Tigers