Top secret

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/10/2023 (1076 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The most mesmerizing spy novel you could hope to find since John le Carré left us starts innocuously enough, with an old gent out for a ramble in rural Devon and encountering the stink of a dead badger.

And soon comes a sound in the night that shouldn’t be there, he grabs a poker — of course, by then, regardless of your security clearance, you’ve figured out this old gent just isn’t an ordinary old gent.

Mick Herron’s The Secret Hours takes us from the final resting place of an unfortunate badger to the inner sanctums of government where the real power lies, to the Berlin station of Her Majesty’s Secret Service in the early 1990s.

Few people we’ll read about are known by their real names, indeed may have forgotten their real names it’s been so long, or are simply known by their job titles. M herein is called First Desk; we never hear her name.

No spoilers, but one hint: you’ll meet a lot of characters 30 years apart, of whom any two could be one person. How many?

In our now, a couple of years ago a vindictively vile prime minister (Tory? A tad overweight? Floppy yellow hair? Hard right wing?) had established a still-ongoing, closed-door inquiry to find historical wrongdoing in British intelligence. The underlying devious purpose: to shift power and enable his deep-pocketed friends to get richer through privatization of some of the data-gathering duties of a soon-to-be-disgraced Secret Service.

Meanwhile, First Desk has managed to keep a lid on and prevent the inquiry from seeing the really bad stuff, until one of the two decent and bored-clueless civil servants on the inquiry support staff goes to the supermarket and emerges to find an envelope beneath his groceries.

Golly.

Readers will understand why you won’t read here about how it happens — top secret, old boy, matter of national security, don’t you know — but soon there’s a witness telling tales of Berlin after the wall fell.

A young female recruit is dispatched to Berlin station, ostensibly to check the books to determine if the nation’s money is being spent as intended, but possibly it’s because someone in London suspects someone in Berlin of malfeasance — though precisely of what kind, well, you wouldn’t expect everything to be obvious in a mystery, would you?

Berlin is full of characters. Think The Third Man or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, only with quirkier people. People who’d flourished behind the wall for decades are now trying to make a shady living in a reunified Germany, but for whose side or, in some cases, sides?

People within British intelligence are frightfully self-aware, making frequent reference to le Carré or to James Bond, the former with much greater reverence.

Bond may have had licence to kill, but let’s just say that in Berlin, planning to kill someone was taken exceptionally seriously.

And back now in contemporary London, what of our old gent from rural Devon, whoever he may be (or was), and what of First Desk and her unfortunately honest civil servants?

What of the conniving former prime minister plotting a return to power with his sleazily corporate friends who may have been someone else truly evil three decades before? What indeed?

Mick Herron has gifted us a magnificently plotted and charactered puzzle, marvellously written. Enjoy.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin denies he’s given Mick Herron a good review just because Herron’s from Newcastle. We’ve edited out, “Eeee, but he’s a smashin’ lad, our Mick, he’s champion and all.”