Before he found huge success with the Slough House/Slow Horses series of spy novels, Mick Herron wrote a short crime fiction series: four books known variously as the Zoë Boehm and the Oxford Investigations series. I haven’t yet read any of the books in the main Slough House series, just Nobody Walks (2015) which is set in the same milieu and mentions characters from the main series, and a potboiler novella. I’ve always liked spy stories, so the Slough House would seem like an obvious choice for me, but when I heard that Herron’s first published books were crime fiction featuring a woman private detective in her forties, they seemed the obvious place to start. So far, I’ve read two of the novels, the first and the last in the series.
In neither of these is Zoë Boehm the main character, though I understand that her role is central to the two middle books, The Last Voice You Hear (2004) and Why We Die (2006), both of which I hope to read before long. The two I’ve read both centre on Sarah Tucker (still known by her married name, Trafford, at the start of the first book, Down Cemetery Road (2003). While Sarah is reluctantly hosting a dinner party for a prospective new client of her husband’s, a house in her South Oxford street blows up, killing a married couple, and orphaning their four-year-old daughter who is shielded from the blast by a wardrobe. Curiously, the husband was already officially dead, having reportedly been killed in a helicopter crash in Cyprus a few years earlier.
Sarah didn’t know either of the dead parents, but when the little girl, Dinah, is spirited away from the hospital Sarah engages a private detective, Joe Silvermann, who is Zoë’s largely estranged husband, to try to find out what happened to her. Joe and Sarah fail to find out very much about the explosion or Dinah’s whereabouts but following a wild goose chase to an orphanage in Surrey, Joe is murdered: his throat is cut with a razor which the killer leaves in his hand, making the death look like suicide. The killer also plants a variety of drugs in Joe’s office and a bag of cocaine behind a loose tile in Sarah’s bathroom.
As a student Sarah had been a fairly prolific drug user but when her first ever acid trip ended with her attempting to fly off the roof of a four-storey house, resulting in several broken bones and a miraculous escape from impaling herself on railings, she stopped using them. However, nobody (including her husband, Mark) initially believes her claim that the cocaine must have been planted. The solicitor friend of her husband whom Mark engages on her behalf advises her that she has no choice but to admit simple possession and blame the deceased Joe as her supplier. She takes the advice and Mark keeps her tranquilized at home.
It’s at this point that Zoë enters the story, and persuades Sarah that she should retract her statement to the police that Joe had been dealing drugs. Sarah does so, to the fury of the investigating detective who threatens her with dire retribution. Not long after this, an attempt is made to kill Sarah. The attempt comes from a very unexpected source but helps Sarah to understand what she’s been getting wrong so far, and why the trip to Surrey was a wild goose chase.
The man who tried to kill her was also the one who had blown up the house, Axel Crane. He worked for a anonymous clandestine branch of the state which to all appearances formed part of the Ministry of Urban Development (whose name was “MUD” anyway). Axel’s superiors were holding Dinah as bait, to catch and neutralize Michael Downey a fellow-soldier of Dinah’s father, Tommy Singleton. (Downey had been in love with Dinah’s mother and thought, mistakenly, that he might have been Dinah’s father.) To be effective as bait, Dinah must be relatively easy for Downey to find, so he and Sarah (whom he has rescued from Axel’s homicidal grip) set off to search for her on a remote, uncharted island off the north-west coast of Scotland, where Downey, Singleton and four others had been held following their official deaths.
The two novels have various elements in common, the most striking being that each story ultimately rests on nefarious experiments carried out on human beings. In Down Cemetery Road, the experiments are part of the age-old quest to develop a weapon which will be lethal to an enemy while remaining harmless to one’s own side. The first aim is achieved perfectly: captured Iraqi conscripts — “boy soldiers” — melt (not figuratively) when exposed to the biological weapon. The British soldiers who have been illegally holding the boy soldiers in custody — themselves already war criminals, having murdered a group of Iraqi prisoners during the Gulf War — have been painted with something that is expected to protect them. (Of course, they haven’t been told why they’ve been painted, or that they are experimental subjects.) The protective coating turns out to be only 70% effective, leaving the surviving soldiers looking and feeling as if they have been flayed.
The experiments in Smoke and Whispers are 30 years in the past. They were conducted, not by the state or the military, but by a psychopathic monomaniac, determined to discover a cure for asthma. He came to an arrangement with an orphanage, run by Catholic priests, which allowed him to test drugs on the orphans, in one case on an eight-year-old girl. A generation later, at least one of the experimental subjects give birth to children with severe birth defects. Gerard Inchon, Sarah’s unlikely (and very rich) friend, tells her about his son, Zach. Zach is eight months old, but Gerard hasn’t previously mentioned him in Sarah’s presence. She didn’t know he existed.
“He has no arms,” Gerard said. “But then, he has no legs either. You know what he looks like? He looks like a Ping-Pong ball balanced on a boiled egg. And I look at him, and I know I’m supposed to love him. And I do. I love him. But I want him to die. Because he’s not living a life, not in any sense you or I would recognize …” (p. 111)
Zach needs a ventilator to breathe. His condition has caused a breach between Gerard and his wife, Paula (whom Sarah had labeled “the Trophy Wife” on first meeting, partly because Paula’s name didn’t register with her). Paula wants Zach to have an existence as comfortable (even pleasurable) as possible. Gerard, as we’ve seen, thinks he should die. Paula and Gerard were both Catholics before. Gerard has abandoned religious belief, Paula seems to have found comfort in hers.
Two other (related) features that these two books have in common are (a) wild goose chases and (b) Sarah’s early but mistaken conviction that she knows who the bad guy is. In the first book, she thinks that Gerard, whom she’s only just met, is up to no good and may have planted the bomb that killed Tommy and Maddie Singleton. Gerard and Paula had come to dinner: Sarah was reluctantly entertaining a prospective new client of her husband’s. Gerard arrived a few minutes after Paula — he said he’d been locking his briefcase in the boot of his car — and Sarah wondered whether he might also have been setting the bomb. When, later, Gerard gives her cryptic warnings, she thinks he is trying to intimidate her, but in fact he’s trying to prepare her for the trouble her husband is about to get into over his money-laundering.
In the other book, Sarah becomes convinced that a bartender in the downmarket Newcastle hotel where Zoë had been staying is actually the shadowy serial killer of women whom Zoë had been pursuing. Barry has an Australian accent and claims to be from “Wallaby Springs” but Sarah overhears him speaking Geordie, and realizes that he has said things to her that might be interpreted as teasing/taunting hints about what has happened to Zoë. Her misapprehension results in the terrorizing and torture by Sarah and another of her unlikely friends of an innocent man who doesn’t have the information she’s looking for. Barry the fake Australian barman suffers because of Sarah’s unwarranted near-certainty, though not as much as Joe did in the earlier book: to the injury of having his throat cut with a razor was added the insult of being branded a drug supplier.
These books tell stories of violence, cruelty and inhumanity in a jocular tone. Sometimes the jocularity verges on the tiresome, particularly in the first book, Chapter 1 of which opens like this:
On discovering a fire, the instructions began, shout Fire! and try to put it out. It was useful, heart-of-the-matter advice, and could be extended almost indefinitely in any direction. On discovering your husband’s guests are arseholes, shout Arseholes! and try to put them out. This was a good starting point. Sarah was one glass of wine away from putting it in motion. (p. 9)
But the effect, for the most part, is of tales of outrageous injustice being told in a deadpan voice leavened with incongruous humour so that the outrage stands out. Herron seems to hate the nastiness of the secret state bureaucracy and institutions exercising authority (like the orphanage). He shows the former resorting to grossly disproportionate violence, often merely for for the sake of convenience. In Nobody Walks, for example, Dame Ingrid Tearney orders the death of a relatively innocent man who might have exposed her scheme to replenish her personal coffers.
Sometimes Herron’s approach veers into the territory of cartoon violence. It’s perfectly entertaing but the apparent exaggeration of the villains’ inhumanity and brutality may occasionally rob his attack of some of its force.
Given the title of the first book, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to find that that novel in particular contains a sprinkling of poetic allusions, many (but not all) to the work of Philip Larkin. My impression is that most of them don’t have any direct thematic relevance to the story, but I may write a further short post at some point.
Sorry this is a couple of days late: it’s been a busier weekend than usual. Next time, I’m hoping to look at some of the work of Helen Dunmore.
Editions: Down Cemetery Road, Baskerville paperback reissue, 2025; Smoke and Whispers, Soho Press paperback, 2015.