In Slow House
On everyday heroes
One thing we should get out of the way first: I read exceptionally, upsettingly fast. So fast, I tend to apologize for it. So fast, people look at me suspiciously, like I’m lying about the time spent reviewing whatever they’ve given me. I can’t help it! I have zero spatial reasoning - all those MENSA books my mom gave me, gathering dust because I can’t rotate a 3D object in my mind - but I read fast with exceptional recall. Everyone has their skills.
It helps when the books are relatively easy reads. And maybe I never made it past page 50 of Gravity’s Rainbow, but by god I devoured the first three books in Mick Herron’s Slough House series this past week. Before that I watched all four seasons of the show based on the books, which is called Slow Horses and is available to you on Apple TV. Craving more (seasons 5 and 6 are in production), I picked up the books. The first two I ordered from Bookshop (linked above), the third I got from the ebook lender Libby (available at a library near you, perhaps?), and now I’m waiting on the rest.
Herron’s inspirations for the series and characters is probably obvious to anyone who’s seen or read a spy thriller in the last forty years. The setting is a battered London office building informally known as Slough House, a kind of rubber room for fuck-up MI-5 agents the government isn’t willing to outright fire. Our nominal hero River Cartwright is a James Bond type, running valiantly across London after various calamities, but unlike Bond or his American counterpart Ethan Hunt, River is often embroiled in messes of his own making and rarely rewarded for all those miles run. His supervisor is Jackson Lamb, a George Smiley analogue gone to seed. As portrayed by Gary Oldman in the TV series he is a portly, greasy haired menace: embittered, flatulent, and constantly smoking. In the books, Lamb is slightly more repugnant, if you can imagine. In both formats, other characters are in and out, some dying, some fired, some getting their chance at heroism. There’s scheming. There’s elaborate plotting. And somehow, Lamb and his team make it (the world, etc.) right in the nick of time. At least so far.
As you can imagine, in these times (expansive gesture towards everything), a well-plotted series about people who’ve been written off but nevertheless manage to save the day is both a draw and a balm.
Aren’t there still people out there, heads down, doing their jobs, trying to make the world a slightly less dangerous place?
What is newsletter, to me?
The long introductory piece I wrote is being shelved for the moment in favor of this meditation on Slow Horses because it is my newsletter, and I do what I want. But, briefly, if you are on this newsletter journey, thanks, because every time someone subscribes buttondown sends me an email with a gif in it, and the gifs have been good.
The tentative schedule for this newsletter is every other Tuesday, when it is ready.
Why Tuesday? I get a lot of newsletters on Monday and Friday, and one on Saturday (!), but nothing midweek, which tells me there’s either a market need or sending on Tuesday is completely against the laws of email marketing. Either way works for me, because this is not actually marketing.
To that end, I think buttondown allows paid subscriptions, but I don’t have a plan to charge, and I can’t see myself charging for what is essentially going to be a lot of musings interspersed with cat pictures.
Look, here’s one now.
a grey cat Cat wise all you need to know is that Henry is gray and Leo is orange.
Leo is a sweet marshmallow puff who gets fat shamed at the vet.
Henry is an evil mastermind who will one day have his revenge on the human race.
(It is possible that one day this newsletter becomes the greatest piece of literature ever written, and people clamor for it and my eternal, infinite wisdom, and people beg me to take their money in exchange for my writing and I add paid posts, which people gladly pay for, and my fame and power grow exponentially, until I am the richest person in the world and I purchase twitter and name it back to twitter, and I make electric cars that don’t explode and kill people, and various European heads of state give me medals, and Mark Zuckerberg tries to shake my hand and I say “No way, bozo,” and then at that point I introduce another tier of newsletter subscription that’s just insanely bitchy email observations about my fellow obscenely rich people, and everyone who reads it can’t help but remark about how incredibly down to earth I am despite being the world’s richest person, and I don’t do anything weird and I give all my money to people who need it, like sick kids and homeless people and refugees, and I fund all the individual gofundmes, and so on and so forth until I die and the New York Times deems me, in a lengthy obituary, a “Beloved Author and Philanthropist.” But until that happens, this is all free to read.)
My God, what have I done?
Another recurring thing I will do is some recommendations, like so:
If you have eyes, a brain, a heart, and a deep and abiding love for mystery-filled dramas set in a liminal space, you’re already a fan of Severance, but have you considered the Severance subreddit? It is full of memes and increasingly outlandish theories. Sometimes people do things like put “Not Like Us” over the Music Dance Experience. It’s like being on the old internet, the one commerce took away.
Did you watch Conclave? With the news that Pope Francis is hospitalized, I personally feel the Oscar campaign has gone too far! The articles on a potential successor have already begun, and I apologize for linking to the New York Post, but their article is the most comprehensive. I’m rooting for Cardinal Tagle, but there sure are a lot of right wing Latin mass ghouls waiting in the wings. Conservatives in Catholicism? What will they think of next?
In an attempt to make it through the next few years I have been trying to find articles and essays on stuff that is not unrelentingly horrible, and I really enjoyed this article about the empty grave of a fictional it girl! Believing a work of fiction was real? People of the 1800s really were just like us.
Well, that’s all from me, and since it’s actually Wednesday for many of you, I hope you have a lovely one. You can always follow me on bluesky if you haven’t already, or forward to a friend you think might like cats/me, and don’t forget that when you’re alone and life is making you lonely you can always go…downtown.
Love,
The Nailbiter