Dickie Bow got left behind by the spy game after the collapse of European communism, and never really found anything else. By the time that Dead Lions begins — it was first published in 2013 — he’s barely holding on with a job in a sex shop and a routine of steady drinking that will kill him later rather than sooner. But when an unmistakable Moscow spook turns up in his local, reflexes kick in, and it’s not long before he learns that some things will kill him much faster than an excess of booze. Dickie follows the spook without any preparation and with little thought; he figures that he can sort things out later. They go on a regional train, which is delayed and then cancelled by technical problems on the line. In the crush of passengers switching from trains to busses, Dickie feels a sharp prick to his thigh, but does not lose his man and they both board the same bus. The bus makes its way to Oxford where, as Herron writes, “it would deliver one soul fewer than it had gathered, back in the rain.” (p. 6)

After the first chapter, the reader is ahead of British secret services, and in particular ahead of Jackson Lamb, the head of the unit that is colloquially known as Slough House and even more colloquially as the slow horses: people who have screwed up badly in the line of duty, but who for one reason or another cannot be summarily fired. Lamb is soon on the scene in Oxford. The official verdict is heart attack — given Dickie’s health and habits, it’s not a surprising one — but Lamb knew Dickie from when they both worked in Berlin, which was then spook central. A heart attack is one thing. A heart attack when you’re on a bus without a ticket for any part of the journey, and less than £20 about your person is quite another. Herron gives readers some funny scenes as Lamb tries to moderate his usual abrasive manner so that he can get useful information from the train and bus staff at Oxford station without revealing his secret service affiliation. He doesn’t get a lot of information, but from between the cushions of the seat where Dickie Bow died, he finds something potentially more important: the deceased’s mobile phone. (Dead Lions is set in a time before smartphones were ubiquitous, so the phone is both more and less than it initially seems.) Going through the phone later, Lamb sees just how socially impoverished Dickie’s post-Service life had been. He also finds an unsent message without a recipient; one word, “cicadas.” It’s a code word Lamb recognizes from Cold War days.

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What does an intelligence agency do with its fuck-ups? Not the operational mistakes, or even the policy disasters, but the people who, for one reason or another, cannot be kept as part of the active service but cannot just be let go. Maybe they embarrassed the agency in some way, and giving them the boot would just compound the embarrassment. Maybe they were close to someone caught working for the other side, not close enough to charge with a crime but too close to be trusted anymore. Maybe they were too traumatized in the line of duty to do good work anymore, but getting rid of them would show others that the reward for sticking one’s neck out—perhaps literally—is getting the sack. Unless the agency in question is the Stalin-era NKVD, such people cannot be shot out of hand.

In Mick Herron’s Slow Horses—the first novel in a series that now runs to nine novels and five novellas, and which has spawned a television adaptation that is presently making its sixth season—the solution that MI-6 has chosen is to put them out to pasture in a place called Slough House, give them tiresome, repetitive, meaningless work, and hope they take the hint to quit or retire of their own accord. Slow Horses introduces the current denizens of Slough House. The name is pronounced with one of those ineffable British vowels that render the first word somewhere between “slow” and “slaw.” Any resemblance between Slough House and the Slough of Despond from Pilgrim’s Progress is surely intentional on the part of the service’s upper mandarins. Said denizens occasionally refer to themselves as the Slow Horses, sometimes with dark humor, sometimes with not quite enough despair to quit.

There is River Cartwright, whose final training exercise went decisively pear-shaped, causing a shutdown of King’s Cross station, a massive and expensive public embarrassment. He says he was set up. Upper ranks say that he would say that, wouldn’t he? Fortunately for Cartwright, his grandfather was a legendary agent in his time; the long afterglow of that service is enough to keep him from getting fired outright, but not enough to keep him out of the purgatory of Slough House. Min Harper had a momentary lapse of attention and left important secret documents on a train. More embarrassment. Louisa Guy lost an important suspect, just lost him. Roddy Ho is the guy in the chair, and he has all of the unpleasant traits a reader would expect from a computer guy who’s also a spy, and a couple more that Herron added just for fun. Overseeing this motley crew is Jackson Lamb, a relic of the Cold War—the book was published in 2010, so only 20 years have passed since the fall of European communism—who will not fit in with the new era. He was a hot-shot, and he does not hesitate to let his underlings know it. He also has attitudes toward women and minorities that would have been out of place in the 1980s, nevermind in Cool Britannia.

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