Review: Spook Street and Thoughts on the Slough House Series
Sharing my enthusiasm for a series I've been enjoying, and I think you will enjoy, too
“Spook Street” is the fourth book in Mick Herron’s Slow House series. In this outing, the Slow Horses are bumbling their way through an international mystery involving a secret spy network that may or may not have ties to the British Secret Service. The twist here is that one of the Slow Horses may be personally involved. Herron does an amazing job juggling all the different characters and storylines and bringing them together in the end. Each Slow House installment is a master class in writing contemporary espionage thrillers.
One of the strongest points of the series, and the books, are the Horses themselves. Herron does a brilliant job of bringing each of them to life without one overshadowing the other (unless a book focuses on one of the Horses). I can see a lot of benefits for a reader in that if you don’t favor a particular character, then another will have their time in the spotlight if you just wait for a scene or two. Another strength are the relationships between the characters and in Book 4 we get insight into Marcus and Shirley and Lamb and his compatriots. We also get deep details about another Horse and their family life. All these portrayals are closely tied to the plots and subplots in the books.
The plots of the books/shows are interesting in that they traverse the time difference between the Cold War and the early 21st century, which is really impressive considering there would have been a 40-50 year time spread between operations that Lamb was directly involved in and operations that the Horses get involved in. Sometimes, these connections get a little far-fetched, but these are escapist espionage thrillers, so as readers we just smile knowingly and move on to the next moment where Lamb displays his acerbic wit and it’s all good. The same holds true with Spook Street, where the original events actually took place almost two generations before the events in the book.
I’m a big fan of the Slow Horses series on Apple TV+ and have watched all four seasons so far. Each season follows the plot of the books fairly closely. The show writers clearly make changes to the plots and characters for the series. As a writer myself, I imagine they make changes to accommodate the format and length of each show and the overall series, so they have to compress a lot of the action that normally plays out in the books.
The result of the changes made for series television is that the plots are simplified and the action can be easier to follow. I’m not sure how much interaction occurred between Herron and the show writers while putting together Spook Street, or any of the books in the series, but I’ve noticed a change between book 1 and book 4 in the length of scenes and how they are written. For me, I grew up on Le Carré, Ludlum, Leonard, and other writers who had a different style, a more literature-first style, and I get a sense that Herron is writing for a later adaptation to a screenplay (or he at least has it in mind).
The action in the show is also easier to follow. Part of this may be how Herron switches between points-of-view in book 4. He tends to cut into a scene with either dialog or action that is attributed to “he” or “she” and it takes me a few sentences to figure out which he or she is doing something. Then I have to backtrack and re-read the paragraph in question so I can mentally establish the right point-of-view. It’s a small quibble and it only happens when all the characters are converging on a plot point and Herron needs to move the camera back and forth to cover different activities.
As an aside, when I read contemporary espionage and mystery fiction, I definitely have a sense that the scenes are shorter, the cliffhangers are steeper, and the writer has a camera lens in mind when writing. It makes me wonder how much of my own writing is influenced in this way. And I’d have to admit it’s about the same. Even if I’m not deliberately writing for a screenplay (oh man, it would be wonderful if someone picked up The Good Killers for a movie, not gonna lie), I’m still mimicking writers such as Mick Herron and Lee Child who are driving the genre bus. We have to meet reader expectations and today’s reader likes shorter, punchier scenes.
Another difference between show and book is that scenes in the show tend to have faster pacing and more dramatic tension than the corresponding scenes in the books. I saw the greatest difference between book pacing and show pacing with season 4 and the Spook Street novel. The show really compresses the dialog and intrigue between Di Taverner and Claude Whelan (2nd Desk and 1st Desk, respectively) while in the book the scenes are more drawn out and the pacing is almost languid. The problem that Herron faces is that he has to clue the reader in to how much danger the Slow Horses are in, and the only way he can really do that is by backfilling exposition through the 1st Desk/2nd Desk conversations. I think he does a great job of it, though, and there’s always a cutaway to the Horses just about when the reader needs a break from paragraphs of subtle implications.
However, in contrast to the shows, the books have more depth in terms of detail, setting, and especially characterization. In terms of setting, Herron makes nearly fully-fleshed out characters of the city of London, the Slough House heating system, and other aspects of the milieu that lesser writers <raises hand, convicted> either don’t bother to do or could never imagine how to do it. Or never even thought to try. I can’t do it justice. You just have to read the books to know what I’m talking about.
I also prefer the characters as written in the books to the characters as written for the series. The book versions of the characters are more capable, more competent, and more fully human than their series counterparts. A Slow Horse in the AppleTV+ series is generally a bumbling oaf with some spy-adjacent skills. A Slow Horse in the books is a competent, trained spy who has a serious character flaw. There’s a difference in approach that warrants closer examination, especially as a writer. As an example, Marcus in the series is a self-important goofball with a gambling addiction while Marcus in the books is a perceptive, competent, and physically capable agent with a gambling addiction. Marcus in the series over-estimates his prowess as an enforcer while Marcus in the series is the first one to accurately size up the capabilities of their opponent and decide to attack him with a stolen car.
This difference carries through to all the characters, even Lamb, who is brilliantly portrayed by Harry Potter’s cool uncle Gary Oldman. In the books, we get a better sense of Lamb as a human being who is compensating for some serious vulnerabilities brought on by age and previous actions that he did in the Secret Service.
All in all, I strongly recommend Spook Street, or any of the first four books in the series, and the AppleTV+ show is definitely worth checking out.
Items mentioned in this post (ads):
Mick Herron’s Slough House series - Book 4
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (Le Carré)
The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
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