Mick Herron, Standing by the Wall: A Slough House Interlude (Baskerville 2022)
This is one of those tiny books designed for display at the check-out of a books-and-mortar bookshop, to be bought on impulse as a small gift for, say, Mother’s Day, or for someone you know to be a fan of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels.
It probably found its way into our house as such a gift. I haven’t read any of the novels, but I love the TV series based on them (and I’m glad to learn that a third season is due to drop in December). For me, this book was a chance to get a taste of how it all works on the page. All the main characters are there: irascible and malodorous Lamb, obnoxious IT wiz Roddy, our hero River, salt-of-the-earth dry drunk Catherine and mistress of the archives Molly. Not much happens: River drops in on the station after extended leave to recover from being poisoned; Lamb has Roddy alter a photograph from the archives; Catherine has a moment of almost human conversation with Lamb, in which he says ‘I don’t do memories’; and most of the reject spies who work at Slough House go out for Christmas drinks. That’s it.
‘Ho!’
The name wasn’t so much dropped as thrown from the top of Slough House, and like a snowball finding its target struck Roddy Ho, two floors down, on the back of his neck. He looked up from his screen, senses quivering. He was needed.
The opening is horrendously over-written, and it goes on in that vein for a couple of pages. I was about to lay the book aside, giving quiet thanks for the wit and nuance of the TV series, when I realised that the over-writing was deliberate, allowing us a taste of Roddy Ho’s self-heroising perception of the world. The irony became clear, the prose settled down, and I was amused and gripped.
Page 47 (I can’t talk about page 76 because this is a very small book) features another piece of mock-heroics:
There was no one to flinch when, with surprising suddenness, Lamb swung his shoeless feet to the floor and went barrelling out of the room, entering Catherine’s office like a Viking on manoeuvres. Flakes of plaster fell from the ceiling when the door slammed against the wall; more drifted free as he pillaged desk drawers with the kind of controlled fury that this room alone, of all Slough House, generally provided sanctuary from. Most of what he found he dropped to the floor – reels of sticky labels, cellophane folders, account books, boxes of Biros, treasury tags; all this junk from another era, as if he were trashing a museum installation – littering the carpet with a mess of ancient stationery.
It comes as no surprise that all this furious pillaging turns out to be just Lamb looking for an envelope. Mick Herron is having a good time, and so is the reader.
The book is a fun chance to see the characters in action on the page. It may be laying the grounds for big events later in the series, or harking back in a way that will delight long-term readers, but whether or not it’s either of those things, it’s an enjoyable confection that entertained me on a train trip from Central to Parramatta and back.
Me fail? I fly! 