Apple has made five series of Slow Horses. The fifth went out on 24 September 2025. There are nine novels and the five series cover the first five books, so if you have only watched, you have four left, and Clown Town, published here on 11 September 2025, is one of them.
After those, these. Lists like this usually send you to le Carré's Cold War novels. Slough House is a comedy about a bad office, so I have gone that way instead.
Our Man in Havana
Graham Greene, 1958. Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in Havana and needs money for his daughter. MI6 recruits him, he invents a network of agents who do not exist, and he sends London drawings of vacuum cleaner parts as sketches of a secret installation in the mountains. London believes him.
The IPCRESS File
Len Deighton, 1962. The narrator is not named in the book. Harry Palmer was invented for the 1965 film with Michael Caine. The narrator is sent to buy a missing biochemist called Raven back for eighteen thousand pounds, and spends a good deal of the book chasing his own unpaid expenses.
Berlin Game
Len Deighton, 1983. Bernard Samson is a desk man in London who used to work Berlin. There is a source over there called Brahms Four who will not deal with anyone else, so he has to go back.
Expo 58
Jonathan Coe, 2013. Thomas Foley works at the Central Office of Information and is sent to Brussels for six months to look after a pub called the Britannia at the World's Fair. Two men in bowler hats take an interest in him.
The Tailor of Panama
John le Carré, 1996. Harry Pendel makes suits for powerful men in Panama City, has debts he has not mentioned to anyone, and is leaned on by British intelligence. He tells them what they want to hear. They act on it.
Transcription
Kate Atkinson, 2018. Juliet Armstrong is eighteen in 1940 and types up recordings of British fascist sympathisers meeting a man they believe is a Gestapo officer and who is MI5. Ten years later she is a producer at the BBC and it comes back.
The Secret Hours
Mick Herron, 2023. Sold as a standalone rather than a Slough House novel. An inquiry called Monochrome has been going through Service files without finding anything and is about to be shut down. Then the OTIS file turns up.
One outside the genre. David Nobbs, The Death of Reginald Perrin, 1975. Reginald Perrin leaves his clothes on a beach and walks away from his job at Sunshine Desserts. The BBC version was called The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and started in September 1976.
