Book reviewer COLIN STEELE highlights the work of author Mick Herron, from his first novel to his latest. 

Mick Herron published his first novel, Down Cemetery Road, in 2003, the first in a four-book series featuring Zoë Boehm, an Oxford private detective.

A copy of that first edition, with dust jacket, recently sold for $US1700 ($A2600) but the Boehm series was not a commercial success.

In 2010, Herron, therefore, began a new series with a book called Slow Horses about a small group of security services rejects occupying a seedy building in London’s Barbican.

Again, this series was not initially successful in sales terms. It was not until John Murray started republishing the series in 2015, that the Slow Horses phenomenon took off. The rest is history.

The global success of the Apple TV Slow Horses series has resulted in Down Cemetery Road (John Murray, $22.99) now being filmed by Apple also.

Starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, the eight part series will be released on October 29. Following Colin Dexter’s example in the Oxford Inspector Morse series, Herron and his wife Jo have a walk-on role in Down Cemetery Road.

Thompson plays Zoë, with Wilson taking the role of Sarah Tucker, an Oxford wife and freelance publisher increasingly dissatisfied with her role in life supporting her husband, a pompous City of London businessman. “Inside, Sarah was storms and hurricanes. Twisters. Summer madness.”

During a gruesome domestic dinner party, a neighbour’s South Oxford house, in which a mother and daughter live, explodes.

The mother is killed but the four-year-old girl Dinah survives. When Sarah goes to visit Dinah, it seems she has mysteriously been removed from the hospital but no one, including the police, will provide information.

Sarah becomes obsessed with finding Dinah and enlists the help of married-couple private investigators Zoë Boehm and Joe Silvermann. Computer whiz, 40-something Zoë , “five foot nine, dark-eyed, curly black hair”, rarely steps out of the office, but this investigation will certainly change that.

Herron deliberately echoes Philip Marlowe in Zoë’s hard-boiled attitude to people, her black leather jacket and a handbag containing cigarettes, vodka and a small silver gun.

Zoë and Sarah, finding the explosion was not caused by a gas leak, quickly become themselves entangled in a major cover-up and dirty secrets within the political establishment, the military and the secret service that will place their lives at risk.

QUIPS and one-liners abound from Jackson Lamb’s lips in the ninth of the Slough House series, Clown Town (Baskerville $32.95). 

Lamb has been brilliantly captured on screen by Gary Oldman, as reaffirmed in the current TV series of London Rules, which was originally published in 2018, it was extremely prescient in predicting the rise of Nigel Farage and right-wing populism.

In Clown Town, Herron’s plot spins off the true story of Freddie “Stakeknife” Scappaticci, apparently Britain’s top agent inside the IRA during the Northern Ireland troubles.

He was linked to at least 18 murders, all while he was on the government payroll, and some of the victims were fellow agents. Herron has said: “The intelligence services were protecting this guy who was a murderer.”

“Stakeknife” becomes “Pitchfork” in the opening scene of Clown Town. A quartet of his former, now retired, MI5 handlers, (Lamb sardonically calling them “The Thursday Murder Club”), threaten to blow the whistle on the Irish murders and the government’s cover up.

This quickly brings some Machiavellian moves by the Service’s First Desk, Diana Taverner, that will involve River Cartwright, still recovering from his near death from a Russian nerve agent and his partner Sid Baker, herself recovering from being shot earlier in the series.

River heads off to an Oxford College, clearly St Antony’s, which has taken his grandfather’s library, in which it is believed to be hidden details of Pitchfork’s activities, implicating a very senior member of the current British government.

From there, Herron constructs another wonderful Slow Horses novel, which, typically, ends not well for several of the characters.

As usual, Herron reflects on British politics. Keir Starmer is recognisable in an unflattering portrait, his “government had hit the ground runny, like a jelly that hadn’t quite set”, while the unctuous former politician Peter Judd, planning a comeback, is clearly based on Boris Johnson.

Jackson Lamb, described as at one stage “bowed over his desk like a Francis Bacon study in onanism” has, as ever, a key role in the conclusion. 

The many Herron fans will certainly enjoy Clown Town, an incisive, and darkly entertaining novel.