October 1, 2024
Streaming Spook Street
The Slough House gang is back on Apple TV+ with the fourth season of Slow Horses and a rather faithful adaptation of Mick Herron’s novel Spook Street, arguably the best of the print series. Boasting all the right ingredients in just the right proportions, the book is a thriller from start to finish interrupted only by Jackson Lamb’s insulting witticisms and turns of phrase.
The TV adaptations of the Slough House books have seen fit to add their own touches to plot lines over the past three seasons. A concern as the fourth approached was how much alteration a novel like Spook Street could withstand. Reasonably, not much. Herron noted in a 2022 interview with Radio Times, the first-season adaptation of the debut novel, Slow Horses, “was very faithful to the plot of the original book. That’s probably less true in the next one for a variety of reasons.” The third season take on Real Tigers also took its share of liberties, but the newest offering has been careful not to wander too far from its source material. The series has maintained the pace and delivery of the book, withholding the most revealing bits of information as long as possible while dropping pertinent clues throughout.
Herron addressed the changes made by the show, telling Radio Times that, for the series, “All the big changes to plots have been made with either my happy agreement or, sometimes, at my suggestion… We want to be more creative and carry on being creative with the adaptation.” If there’s a caveat to that, it would concern two factors. “There will be changes,” he said, “but for me the important things are the characters and the tone, which elides between comedy and sometimes tragedy.”
That has been ably handled by the series’ writers, who manage to inject an accurate dose of personalities and mannerisms from the books. This season, the show introduces two new characters culled from Herron’s 2015 stand-alone novel, Nobody Walks – Dancer and J.K. Coe. Far from being a major character, Dancer appears briefly, but there will be more of him to come. Coe, however, is more prominent as a new member of the slow horses. He offers a quick summation of the issues that landed him in Slough House, but his backstory is detailed in Nobody Walks, a necessary read to understand him. Herron even made it a point to discuss him in an interview with the Spy Write website, stating that Spook Street “also gave me license to recruit J.K. Coe for Slough House a couple of years later. I’m very glad about that.”
Herron began his career as an author penning detective fiction, but he’s never lost his edge as a mystery writer, even when he began exploring the genre for which he’s most known. In her 2022 New Yorker profile of Herron, Jill Lepore explained, “On July 7, 2005, as Herron was on his way to work, four suicide bombers set off bombs in London, three on subways and one on a bus… The bombings helped persuade him to turn from detective fiction to spy fiction.”
Spook Street, in print or on TV, opens with a similar act of terrorism, the origins of which, once traced, might be even more heinous than the act itself. In this story, sins are abundant and there are enough culprits on which to pin the blame, but only if the pieces of the past, scattered and adrift like former MI5 puppeteer David Cartwright’s current state of mind, can be reassembled and held accountable. And that’s where the slow horses, unwittingly and unsolicited, come in.
Lamb, as irascible as always, has become an icon of modern spy fiction, a 21st century ex-agent to John le Carre’s Cold War-era George Smiley. Gary Oldman, currently portraying the less-than-lovable Lamb, once played Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. But le Carre had his own J. Lamb in Smiley’s People. On pages 103 and 104, a taxi driver by that name picks up Smiley as a fare. The spy is looking for information and buys it with a ten-pound note. Herron has stated that the similarity of names “didn’t mean that such petty larceny hadn’t occurred.” If it had, he said, “it had happened subliminally, dredged up from an earlier reading.” But Herron’s Lamb would never have accepted Smiley’s money. He would have divulged nothing and pried information of his own. For Slough House fans, it’s not difficult to imagine how that would play out.
Slow Horses is gaining more attention with each season, deservedly so. The TV series is renewed for a fifth season and will undoubtedly tackle London Rules, the next in the book series. We don’t know when that will arrive, but Down Cemetery Road, from Herron’s Oxford Series of novels, is being prepped for a screen adaptation. And the next Slough House book can’t be that far away.
Sources
Earle, Toby. “Slow Horses writer Mick Herron Teases ‘Big Changes’ in Season 2.” Radio Times, 12 July 2022. retrieved from radiotimes.com.
Herron, Mick. “What Re-reading John le Carre Taught Me.” Penguin Books, 19 October 2021. retrieved from penguin.co.uk.
Lepore, Jill. “Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?” The New Yorker 28 November 2022.
“Mick Herron – Interview.” Spy Write, 22 August 2018. retrieved from spywrite.com.
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Read a review of Nobody Walks in Book Club Corner
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