Recommended Reading and Viewing- THE SECRET HOURS - a new novel by Mick Herron and SLOW HORSES (Apple TV)

 “…since how we act in the light of day is largely for other people’s benefit, but what we do in the secret hours reveals who we really are.”

It takes a while, around page 256, for Mick Herron to tell us his meaning of ‘the secret hours’, the title of his new book about the spy trade and the spy business. It also takes quite a while for Herron to get us back into the orbit of Jackson Lamb, renamed under his espionage alias as Brinsley Miles and now back in Berlin in the 1990s, post the wall coming down but still a hotbed of intrigue. That doesn't come till around page 190 and the novel picks up speed and grip from that point.

 

From then it doesn’t take long for the aficionados to work out the Lamb/Miles connection:

 

Alison North, another alias that does take a long while to be revealed, brilliantly,  makes her views known in an early encounter in her Berlin posting, organised by David Cartwright (if you don’t know who these names are then you are going to have start off with Slow Horses and work your way forward):

 

“Which means I expect to be treated with respect. And if that bar’s too high, you can at least refrain from treating me with contempt. Do we understand each other?

“He stared for a long while, his face partially wreathed in the smoke his cigarette was sighing. And then, quietly but unmistakably, he farted.”

 

The Secret Hours  is probably the longest book (391pp) that Mick Herron has written in his Balzacian chronicling of Jackson Lamb and London’s spies. It ranges across the European continent and engages with British politics more directly than before. It doesn't take a genius to work out that Boris Johnson is being regularly pilloried and that Sparrow is a hatchet job on the odious Dominic Cummings of Brexit fame. And you wonder whether it might have once been a series of incidents that possibly would have formed small entries in what are referred to among the “Standalone Books” in the Herron bibliography at the front. Previously there were The List, The Drop and The Catch  all modest novellas that dovetailed into the Jackson Lamb Slough House stories, introducing new characters, explaining things about others. 

 

In The Secret Hours (spoiler alert) we come to learn for instance not just who killed Charles Partner but why and we learn how archivist Molly lost her legs.

 

So far the TV adaptations have only done two of the books so that makes six to go if they get to even the current end to say nothing of the incidents in the novellas and any future stories. But those two series have nailed down the characters and we have to hope that Gary Oldman (below as Jackson Lamb) stays alive and doesn’t age any further for starters.

 

Still there’s one question I don’t know the answer too. Is the Description “First Desk”, or in the case of this new novel “First Chair”, Herron’s invention? Love to know the answer.

Streaming on BritBox - Rod Bishop recommends A SPY AMONG FRIENDS (Dir:Nick Murphy, Sc: Alexander Cary, UK, 2022)

Kim Philby

“Chaps like us.” 

“Yes, chaps like you.” 

These are two of the last lines spoken in this spy series based around Kim Philby (Guy Pearce), Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis), Anthony Blunt (Nicholas Rowe), Sir Roger Hollis (Adrian Edmondson) and the entirely fictional Lily Thomas (Anna Maxwell Martin). 

Damian Lewis, Guy Pearce

It’s the early 1960s and an MI6 intelligence operator, the Cambridge-educated Nicholas Elliott, a chum and an intelligence colleague of Philby since 1940, is struggling to accept a “chap like us” has been a KGB double agent for all of that time.

It’s personal for Elliott. Philby was by some distance his best friend but Elliott must now accept that for decades his “best chap” had been gaslighting him by his treasonous betrayal. 

This Philby “chap” epitomizes upper-class self-loathing. He is coming apart at the seams and hates the British class system for its rank stupidity. Particularly the inability of the incompetent intelligence services to believe someone born into the ruling class of the British Empire could be a traitor.

Anna Maxwell Martin

“Chaps like us” have oodles of charm. It’s essential in deflecting dangerous inquiries into their personal behaviour. They top this with their shield of class superiority, underscoring an “I will not be questioned” haughtiness. None better at this than Sir Anthony Blunt, hiding in plain sight behind the Queen’s largesse, and giving learned dissertations on art history to adoring audiences.

Along with their heavy scotch and gin consumption, “chaps”consume lots of cups of tea and there’s always “it’s Thursday, isn’t it? Let’s have Beef Wellington at my Club”. Getting pissed in local pubs and reviving drunken, improvised limericks from their Cambridge days is a thing, and, of course, they need to be kept abreast of the cricket scores during England vs Australia Test Matches.

Elliott has volunteered to go to Beirut to extract Philby’s confession, but after days of drunken interrogation, Elliott apparently stuffs it up and Philby escapes to Moscow. Or, ponders British intelligence, is this a CIA connivance to embed Philby in the heart of the KGB as a triple-agent for the USA?

Top - Elliott, Philby, Angleton
Lower  - Lewis, Pearce, Stephen Kunken

Most of this is revealed in episode one and the remaining five episodes are left to carefully unpick the characters of Philby and Elliott. This is achieved mostly through the inquiries of someone who is definitely not a “chap like us” – Lily Thomas, a Northerner, married to a black doctor, and whose outlook on life couldn’t be more different to Elliott or Philby. 

Despite the power struggles between their characters, Damian Lewis as Elliott, Guy Pearce as Philby and Ann Maxwell Martin as Thomas all give exquisitely balanced performances. No scenery chewing here. 

A Spy Among Friendsis based on a novel by Ben Macintyre and another of Macintyre’s books SAS Rogue Heroes has just been made as a TV series. I haven’t read either book, but these two series couldn’t be more different from each other. One is a grown-up, sophisticated spy drama and the other is neither sophisticated nor grown-up. It’s more like a Marvel Comic adaptation.

However, there is one similarity between the two. 

They are both about “Chaps like us”.

John le Carré may well have approved of Damian Lewis’s interpretation of Nicholas Elliott. In The Pigeon Tunnel,le Carré spends an entire chapter on the Elliott-Philby friendship:

Damian Lewis

“Nicholas Elliott. Philby’s most loyal friend, confidant and devoted brother-in-arms in war and peace, child of Eton…and surely the most entertaining spy I ever met.

In retrospect, he also remains the most enigmatic. To describe his appearance is, these days, to invite ridicule. He was a sparkling bon vivant of the old school. I never once saw him in anything but an immaculately cut, dark three-piece suit.

He was as thin as a wand, and seemed always to hover slightly above the ground at a jaunty angle, a quiet smile on his face and one elbow cocked for the martini glass or cigarette…He looked like a P.G. Wodehouse man-about-town, and spoke like one…

Guy Pearce

…Among the many extraordinary things that Elliott had done in his life, however, the most extraordinary and undoubtedly the most painful was to sit face to face in Beirut, with his close friend, colleague and mentor Kim Philby, and hear him admit he had been a Soviet spy for all the years they had known each other.

…One evening in May 1986 in my house, twenty-three years after he received Philby’s partial confession, he poured out his heart to me in what turned out to be the first in a succession of such meetings…

While he talked, I scribbled in a notebook.

Elliott:

‘I always had the feeling that Philby himself would like to get the whole thing off his chest and settle down and follow cricket, which was what he loved. He knew cricket averages backwards and forwards. He could recite cricket till the cows came home.’

Self: ‘So, what were your sanctions if [Philby in Beirut] didn’t cooperate?’

Elliott: ‘What’s that, old boy?’

‘Your sanctions, Nick, what could you threaten him with...you could have him sandbagged, for instance, and flown to London?’

‘No-one wanted him in London, old boy’

‘Well, what about the ultimate sanction then – forgive me – could you have him killed, liquidated?’

‘My dear chap. One of us.’

 Chaps like us, indeed.