History happens first as tragedy, then as farce. John le Carré used the spy novel to chart the decline of Britain’s influence on the global stage, and Mick Herron, picking up the baton with his series of Slough House novels, employs comic absurdity to drive home the same message.
Slough House is where the ‘slow horses’ of MI5 are put out to pasture for a variety of misdemeanours; the latest in the series, Clown Town (Baskerville, £22) opens with an ex-spy blackmailing MI5’s First Desk, the formidable Diana Taverner, by threatening to go public with a long-buried operation in Northern Ireland in which ‘the Service had aided and abetted a psychotic murderer as sectarian venom designed to undermine the [Good Friday] Agreement’. A bad look for MI5, certainly, but Diana’s problems are as much personal as political: her old foe Peter Judd, the former Home Secretary now cast into the wilderness, is also blackmailing her in his bid to curry favour with his shadowy backers vis-a-vis ‘the proposed UN resolution about ownership of territories in the South China Sea’.
Unwilling to countenance treason, or at least not traceable treason, Diana’s first thought is to toss some expendable slow horses at her problems, but that doesn’t sit well with Jackson Lamb, the ex-cold war spy who oversees the motley crew at Slough House: no one is throwing Lamb’s slow horses to the wolves except him.
With eight Slough House novels already published, Herron’s formula is well established: intricate plots of simmering tension, an intelligence service that hums with mundanity and mendacity, and X-rated dialogue delivering character assassination with every withering riposte. Herron’s most recent offering, The Secret Hours (2023), offered a historical perspective on many of the series regulars, and Herron has returned to the modern day energised and refreshed, adding a deliciously cynical pitch-black comedy to a series that continues to reinvigorate the spy fiction genre.
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Invented by Anthony E Pratt during the second World War, and inspired by the murder mystery parlour games he observed while working as a musician in country houses, Cluedo became one of the most popular board games in the world after it debuted in 1949. Nicola Upson’s The Christmas Clue (Faber, £10) opens with Anthony Pratt and his wife Elva arriving at a rundown hotel in Sussex on Christmas Eve in 1943, where they are due to host a murder mystery over the festive period, only to discover that staff shortages require them to rewrite their script and invite the hotel guests to become the suspects in a fictional killing. But then a local shop owner, Miss Silver, is discovered bludgeoned to death, and the party game is eclipsed by a far more serious investigation. Can Elva and Anthony – the latter boasting “an encyclopaedic knowledge of true crime” – discover the identity of the real murderer?
Framed as a submission to a TV production company as a possible Netflix-style true crime documentary, The Killer Question is excellent on the minutiae of pub quiz competitions and its micro-aggressions
A genteel affair that leans into Anthony Pratt’s own devotion to Agatha Christie’s novels, The Christmas Clue is a classic country house mystery given a charming veneer by Nicola Upson’s gorgeously detailed rendition of a wartime Christmas.
Agatha Christie’s long shadow also looms over Seishi Yokomizo’s Murder at the Black Cat Café (Pushkin Vertigo, £10.99), which opens in 1947 in an insalubrious Tokyo suburb with a Buddhist monk discovered in the act of burying a corpse in the back yard of the Black Cat Café, ie, a bordello. The corpse has decomposed to the point where its features are unrecognisable; and why, wonders Detective Murai, was a Buddhist monk involved in its disposal? Luckily, the famous private detective Kosuke Kindaichi, who regularly corresponds with the mystery writer ‘Y—’, arrives to explain to the police the various kinds of mystery fiction murders, including that of ‘the faceless corpse murder’, whereupon he more or less takes over the investigation.
[ The Honjin Murders: Classic Japanese murder mysteryOpens in new window ]
Seishi Yokomizo (1902-1981) was every bit as prolific as Georges Simenon; Murder at the Black Cat Café, which was originally published in Japan in 1947, and here translated by Bryan Karetnyk, is one of 77 titles in the Kosuke Kindaichi series. Quaintly implausible (unless post-second World War Tokyo detectives were in the habit of allowing civilians to drive their investigations), the story is as spare and streamlined as any of Inspector Maigret’s investigations, and as fiendishly complicated as a Sherlock Holmes puzzler.
Set against a backdrop of hotly contested pub quiz competitions, Janice Hallett’s The Killer Question (Viper, £18.99) centres on the remote pub, The Case is Altered, which is run by husband-and-wife team Mal and Sue Eastwood, who have been The Case’s landlords for the past two years. A man who loves obscure trivia, Mal hosts the Monday night pub quiz for locals, most of whom are irritated when a new team, The Shadow Knights, begin turning up every Monday and answering virtually every question correctly. Convinced that the Knights are cheating – Mal takes pride in writing his own quiz questions – the host sets out to discover the team’s method; but when a dead body is pulled from a nearby river, and is quickly identified as a man publicly branded as a cheat by Mal during a recent altercation, a murder investigation is set in train.
Framed as a submission to a TV production company as a possible Netflix-style true crime documentary, The Killer Question is excellent on the minutiae of pub quiz competitions and its micro-aggressions, and Hallett is equally good at fleshing out Mal and Sue’s previous career as police officers, when they were involved in investigating a gangland kidnapping. Told in a contemporary epistolary style – the entire novel unfolds by way of emails, texts, WhatsApp group messaging and audio transcripts – the story grows increasingly improbable as it nears its denouement, but until then it is (like all the best pub quizzes) brain-bending fun.
Rav Grewal-Kök’s The Snares (No Exit Press, £9.99) begins with lawyer Neal Chima being head-hunted from the US Department of Justice for a new intelligence initiative being launched by the Obama administration, which will focus on targeted intelligence and surgical drone strikes in the war on terrorism.
Given oversight of Taliban operations on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, Chima, an American-born Sikh, initially believes that he has agreed to join ‘an intelligence project that’s clean, effective, and just’. But Chima has reckoned without the cold war veterans who lurk at the heart of the military-industrial complex, and who see a new opportunity to wage their old wars: ‘What I’m planning is something grand. Power without recourse. Hooded figures in the night. The tools of dictatorship in the hands of freedom-loving patriots.’
A bracingly cynical and unsentimental take on the spy novel, this impressively accomplished debut is reminiscent of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, as the well-meaning Chima, stripped of his illusions about justice, finds himself reduced to a cog in ‘a machine that breaks bodies and souls’.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
