Every list of Mick Herron's books online has the same mistake on it. Standing by the Wall collects the shorter Slough House pieces, the publisher calls them novellas, so the lists call them novellas. Some of them are short stories. The Last Dead Letter, 2020, is one. You do not need any of them to read the novels.
The novels are the nine. Slow Horses 2010, Dead Lions 2013, Real Tigers 2016, Spook Street 2017, London Rules 2018, Joe Country 2019, Slough House 2021, Bad Actors 2022, Clown Town 2025. Read them in that order. The grudges pile up. Skip about and you lose them.
His first novel was Down Cemetery Road, 2003. The Crime Writers' Association says he 'began writing fiction while working as a sub editor in London'. The Goldsboro Gold Dagger came in 2013, for Dead Lions. He said, 'I can't quite believe I get to put my own book next to them.'
Ranked, then.
1. Spook Street
2017. Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, 2017. River Cartwright's grandfather David is a retired spook living on his own in Kent, and his memory is going. Other people want what is still in there. There is a scene near the start I have thought about since.
2. Dead Lions
2013. Gold Dagger. An old agent called Dickie Bow dies on a bus in Oxfordshire. Jackson Lamb does not think it was his heart. A Cold War network called the Cicadas, and a village called Upshott.
3. Slow Horses
2010. Failed MI5 agents sent to Slough House to do filing until they resign. A young man is kidnapped and filmed, with a countdown to his beheading. Start here.
4. London Rules
2018. A run of attacks with no pattern to them, a Derbyshire village shot up, a politician called Dennis Gimball, and Roddy Ho's love life.
5. Real Tigers
2016. Catherine Standish is taken. The others leave the office to get her back.
6. Bad Actors
2022. A Swiss superforecaster called Sophie de Greer goes missing from a Downing Street think tank, and the adviser who hired her would rather that went away. River Cartwright is barely in this one and readers fall out about it.
7. Slough House
2021. Former agents dying and nobody saying why. The bleak one. Not a lot of laughs.
8. Clown Town
Published here on 11 September 2025, two days after the American edition. Still settling. Ask me again in a year.
9. Joe Country
2019. Somebody has to be ninth.
He has another four books, about a woman called Zoë Boehm, starting with that 2003 one. Apple filmed it. Eight episodes, out worldwide on Wednesday 29 October 2025, two to start and then one a week until 10 December. Their announcement calls him a 'CWA Diamond Dagger Award-winning author', which is the award for the whole career rather than for one book.
I will do those four separately. There is a thing about the first one that annoys people and it is worth a post of its own.
