January 1, 2024
Secret Hours by the Wall
It all begins with a photograph, one that surfaced in autumn 2022 and in which three figures are seen standing in front of a wall. The photo, we’ll eventually discover, was taken in 1994 and features a man “beaming broadly,” a woman “wearing a shyer smile” and another man “strangely expressionless, as if caught between two moods.”
The cryptic picture was mystery/spy author Mick Herron’s Christmas present to readers, gifted in the form of a new short story, “Standing by the Wall,” a tale from the writer’s Slough House series about n’er-do- well “slow horses” in the spy trade deposited into their own department to fritter away the days on inconsequential tasks. The fact that trouble invariably finds them is just one reason the books have a wide readership. Another is the group’s leader, Jackson Lamb, a cantankerous former field agent whose political and social incorrectness provide the laughs and whose skill set affords the team a fighting chance. Yet another is the Apple TV+ adaptation of Herron’s novels for the Slow Horses streaming series.
The TV show, having recently completed its third season with an adaptation of Herron’s Slough House novel Real Tigers, follows the slow horses as they’re caught in the crossfire of their own intelligence service and a mysterious security faction determined to complete its mission at any cost. There are plenty of liberties taken with the print source as situations are reimagined, compressed or supplanted, but there are other moments in which the book’s depiction of a scene is rendered so accurately that a reader might experience déjà vu. And Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Lamb is handled with aplomb, his impatience, sarcasm and insults rendered with the wit of the novels, leaving both readers and viewers to wonder if the character had always been this way. Last year’s short story inched us a bit closer to the answer.
In 2022, “Standing by the Wall” seemed to be readying things for the next book in the Slough House universe, but it was also beginning to formulate another of Herron’s mysteries. A younger Lamb is one of the figures in the Berlin photo. A youthful Molly Doran, archivist at the Regent’s Park intelligence branch, is another. Herron has bided his time for the past year before offering anything specific about Otis, the third figure, and he’s now opened the file on him in his 2023 stand-alone novel The Secret Hours, released in September. But the book’s sly references to and codenamed cameos by some of his Slough House cast provide an extra layer of depth for long-time fans.
The plot revolves around a committee investigation into British intelligence that is hamstrung from the start by the overseeing and unnamed First Desk – until a mysterious file appears. The folder contains the paperwork for a Berlin operation from 1994 as well as the aforementioned photograph and unlocks a door the committee has been waiting to open. Through testimony of a codenamed “Alison North,” we are transported back to the early 1990s, to a juncture in time and yet another photograph still capable of haunting the present.
The Secret Hours has its own characters and agenda, which won’t be revealed here, but for readers of Herron’s oeuvre the hidden delights are the cleverly manipulated name-dropping and guest appearances of some old friends. As Herron told John Murray Books in August, The Secret Hours “is not a Slough House novel as such, but it’s set in the same universe…[it’s] quite well-entwined with the world I’d already created…The more I thought about the book as I was working my way into it, the more I realized I wasn’t trying to veer away from my normal subject matter, I was trying to approach it from a different angle.”
How does the novel compare to the Slough House books? There is no team of slow horses in this novel, no wayward personalities in need of adjustment and maybe a slight bit less humor. But that doesn’t mean that The Secret Hours can’t hold its own. The opening sequence is breathtaking. North’s testimony becomes a revealing glimpse into a past without a digital footprint, but potent, nonetheless. And the mysteries of both a thirty-year-old Berlin scenario and a former agent currently pursued by would-be kidnappers are riveting.
Slough House fans have probably already devoured the novel by now. But for the uninitiated, why not dive into “Standing by the Wall” and The Secret Hours and then tackle the Slough House books? You’ll have the advantage of knowing the backstory before starting the series.
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