If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse. Moscow rules had been written on the streets, but London rules were devised in the corridors of Westminster, and the short version read: someone always pays. [p. 254]
Someone described this as 'Generation X slacker spies' and that's an apt summary. Slough House (hence 'slow horses') is where MI5's rejects -- the ones who've left classified info in a public place, the ones who've screwed up a training exercise, the ones who make bad calls or are implicated in bad ops -- end up. It's easier than firing them and there's always a chance that Jackson Lamb, the unlikeable, uncharismatic and flatulent head of Slough House, will inspire them to leave of their own accord.
But most of the slow horses still want to matter, and when a high-profile terrorism threat (a Pakistani youth. live on camera, due to be beheaded) goes wrong, Slough House's bunch of losers get a chance to be ... well, not exactly heroes, but certainly significant players. Unfortunately the enemies are rather closer to home than Le Carre's Russians or Fleming's supervillains.
There's a bleakness to Slow Horses that didn't appeal to me, though I did recognise the London in which I live: no exclusive gentlemen's clubs or quiet suburban mansions, just a run-down office block near the Barbican, and the recent memory (this was first published in 2010) of the bombs in July 2005.
Occasionally patchy writing ('They crossed the black river in a blue car, red memories staining their minds') but on the whole very readable, with an engagingly twisty plot. I'll probably read more in the series, now up to eight books and a TV series.
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