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Crime fiction round-up: Mick Herron charts decline of British secret services

Plus new thrills from Sam Blake, Walter Ellis, Cherie Jones and Lara Thompson

Mick Herron: writer of Slough House. Photograph: Mikael Buck

Declan Burke's face
Declan Burke
Tue Feb 2 2021 - 06:00

Moral certainty is a luxury no decent spy novelist can afford, and especially now that the old ideologies have been replaced by variations on neo-liberal capitalism.

Mick Herron's Slough House (John Murray, £11.99) is the latest in a series of novels that have charted the decline of the British secret services, in which the "slow horses" of British intelligence – the goofs, screw-ups and no-hopers – have been exiled to the purdah of Slough House, which is run by the Cold War veteran Jackson Lamb.

In the seventh instalment of his superb series, Herron explores the possibility of an all-too-believable coup orchestrated by the populist politician Peter Judd and the “mini-Murdoch” Damien Cantor, self-styled “Champions of the New Democracy”. The two scheme to undermine parliament against a backdrop of yellow-jacket protests and tit-for-tat assassinations carried out in reprisal for the poisoning of foreign citizens on British soil.

As always, Lamb (despite “looking like a bin someone had set fire to”) is the unlikely hero, a latter-day George Smiley who fully justifies Herron’s reputation as the heir to the late, lamented John le Carré.

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Sam Blake's The Dark Room (Corvus, £10.99) begins with the murder of the homeless Alfie Bows in London but swiftly moves to Hare's Landing in rural Cork, where Caroline Kelly,  New York-based investigative reporter, meets Rachel Lambert, producer of documentary films. When Rachel confides that she has travelled to Cork to investigate whether the connection between Bows and Hare's Landing might shed light on the motive for his murder, the pair team up, only to discover that sinister forces – some of them supernatural – are conspiring against them.

Blake cleverly blends Caroline and Rachel’s skills to create a formidable team of contemporary investigators, even as the Big House of Hare’s Landing and a number of references to Agatha Christie render The Dark Room a loving homage to the golden age of mystery detection.

Chris Hammer's previous two novels were set in rural Australia. In Trust (Wildfire, £12.99), recurring characters Martin Scarsden and Mandalay Blonde find themselves in Sydney, where investigative reporter Martin tries to discover the truth about Mandalay's ex-boyfriend Tarquin Molloy, an undercover cop who absconded with millions from Mollison's Bank five years previously.

Blending cutting-edge technology and nods to classic private eye fiction (Martin is a Philip Marlowe-like knight-errant; characters are compared to Bogart and Bacall), the plot uncovers a malign, quasi-Masonic organisation at the heart of the Australian body politic. A superfluous subplot about the ups and downs of Martin and Mandalay’s relationship aside, Trust is a taut, complex tale of corruption and betrayal that also functions as an elegy for old-school journalism.

Walter Ellis's debut, Franco's Map (Conrad Press, £8.99), opens in 1940, with Charles Bramall dispatched to Madrid as equerry to the politically unsound Duke of Windsor, although Bramall's real role is to ensure that Germany doesn't drag Spain into the war on the Axis side.

A tough ask, as they say, and especially as the mission is Bramall’s first as a spy, but Our Man in Madrid is undeterred: “His entire previous knowledge of [espionage] was confined to The Thirty Nine Steps and The Riddle of the Sands, which he had read and enjoyed when he was about sixteen, never dreaming that he might one day star in a sequel.” What follows is an enjoyably improbable romp that involves Bramall consorting with a host of historical figures, among them Oswald Mosley, the Duke of Windsor, Kim Philby and Adolf Hitler.

Lara Thompson's One Night, New York (Virago, £16.99) begins with Frances Addams fleeing "a kind of hell" in Depression-era Kansas for the bright lights of New York, where she shares a tiny apartment with her older brother Stan. An illiterate country girl, Frances is entranced by the artists, writers and jazz musicians she meets, and particularly Agnes, an aspiring photographer who becomes Frances' lover and co-conspirator when Frances sets out to right a terrible wrong.

Framed as a revenge thriller, the novel is far more enjoyable for the way Thompson brings 1930s New York to life. Inspired by the brutal realities of Weegee’s crime scene photographs, Thompson’s impressive debut delivers a beautifully detailed and multifaceted account of Jazz Age New York that blends the city’s dazzling sophistication with an unflinching depiction of its sordid realities.

Set on Barbados in the 1980s, Cherie Jones' How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (Tinder Press, £12.99) centres on Lala, a young woman heavily pregnant with Adan's baby on the night when Adan commits a robbery, during which he callously shoots dead the husband of the wealthy Mira Whalen. "Murder is a thing best forgotten, a thing best left a mystery," Lala decides by way of justifying her not confessing the truth to the police. But her lies only compound her misery: Adan is a violent man who fully intends to murder Mira Whalen to prevent her from testifying against him in the unlikely event of his case ever coming to trial.

Despite its ostensibly idyllic Caribbean setting, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is a dark tale of incest, domestic violence and murder set against a backdrop of generational poverty, and a bracingly fatalistic account of male violence: “For the women of her lineage, a marriage meant a murder in one form or another.”

Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).