Long may Mick Herron’s slow horses spread their manure of chaos

Bad Actors
Mick Herron
Baskerville

Bad Actors is the eighth novel in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses spy thriller series, and one of the best. However, having said that, I would recommend readers start with the first book and work through — things might be somewhat confusing otherwise, though Bad Actors could work as a standalone if you keep your wits firmly about you. But there’s a lot of fun to be had from the whole series.

Jackson Lamb’s collection of failed spies and misfits — the slow horses — are still going through the motions of being members of the security services in the increasingly derelict Slough House, all pining for action, in most cases the more violent the better. There’s one new recruit, who has pretty good reason to dislike Jackson, not that it’s going to do her any good. Never doubt who is the boss.

An apparently Swiss member of the Downing Street advisers’ team seems to have vanished, and the head of Moscow’s spies has made an unannounced and unexplained visit to London. The terrifying chief Brit spy, Diana Taverner, is in an awkward position which even her sheer nastiness may not get her out of, and Jackson, of course, has his grubby ear firmly to the ground. Even a cursory knowledge of the horror show that is British politics will enable the reader to work out who represents who in Herron’s recreation of the political world. The book is often hilarious.

Herron has constructed his novel brilliantly, with intermissions of current interactions between Jackson and Diana interspersed with something of a backstory of recent activities of the slow horses, who have muddied the waters to an alarming extent. It all heads to a violent and chaotic conclusion as the author juggles with all the strands of his novel.

There’s more to Herron’s writing than the exuberant telling of a story. Bad Actors can be read as a political satire and a comment on the state of the world — Russians are bad guys again, even though the book was written before the invasion of Ukraine. There’s violence aplenty, though the description of it is often very funny. There is also beautiful descriptive writing which adds to the sense that you are in the hands of a master. Long may the slow horses spread their manure of chaos.