Dead Lions

Mick Herron is called “John le Carré of our time” and a new hope for British literature; he is compared with Raymond Chandler and Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Elmore Leonard and Joseph Heller. Herron’s novels are “a funny, on the verge of farce, wonderfully cynical caricature of politicians, bureaucrats, internecine infighting, and the Great Game” (Booklist), and his heroes (“lame horses,” i.e., the weaklings from Slough House) are disgraced counterintelligence officers punished “for a taste for drugs, alcohol, or promiscuity; for intrigue and betrayal; for discontent and doubt; and also for an unforgivable blunder.” Watching over them is Jackson Lamb—“the Falstaff of our day” (Sunday Times) and “one of the most monstrous characters in contemporary literature” (Bernard Cornwell).

In the second novel of the cycle, “Dead Lions,” an old acquaintance of Lamb from his Berlin service era—the former informer named Dickie Bow—dies on a bus on the way to Oxford. Not only does his death look suspicious, but on Lamb’s mobile phone he finds an undelivered message with a single word: “Cicadas.” That means the mythical intelligence network of deep cover conspiracy may not be mythical after all. But in MI5, there’s no time—counterintelligence is paralyzed by an “audit that’s more reminiscent of the Inquisition,” and dealing with the “Cicadas” and their mythical (or maybe not mythical?) handler will fall to Lamb and his “lame horses”…

Based on the first books of the Slough House cycle, a TV series was greenlit (two seasons at once). Filming took place in 2020–2021. Gary Oldman played Jackson Lamb; the series also features Jack Lowden, Olivia Cooke, Jonathan Pryce, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Christopher Chung. The director of the first season was James Hawes (“Merlin,” “Black Mirror,” “Doctor Who,” “The Alienist,” “Raised by Wolves”).