The Catch

All right class, please take your seats. Today we’re going to continue learning about London Rules, an unwritten guideline for survival in Mick Herron’s world of spy vs. spy. I’m sure you recall #1: Cover your arse. In this novella we get an excellent example of #2: Always be a fair distance from a fuck-up. Words to live by.

Unfortunately, John Bachelor must have misplaced his copy of the rules. Otherwise, he’d never have agreed to track down wayward agent Benny Manors. He might not have contacted MI6 queen bee Diana Taverner. And he definitely wouldn’t have drank his weight in gin.

This novella is part of a series with close ties to Herron’s Slough House books. Like The Drop & The List, it features “milkman” John show more Bachelor, an aging spook with one foot out to pasture. He’s clinging to employment with a part time job babysitting retired agents. Because someone needs to make sure they don’t become too chatty in their old age.

John is down on his luck & needs to stay off MI6’s radar. But there’s life in the old guy yet & you can’t help pulling for him as things go from bad to cataclysmic. The plot is a devious mix of hidden agendas wrapped in misinformation & smothered with lies.

These novellas have a different tone from the full length novels but you can always count on Herron’s dry wit as he delivers his sly & thinly veiled take on current events. It’s a shortie that concludes with an excerpt from his stand alone novel “This is What Happened”. And a great little snack for fans as we impatiently wait for Jackson Lamb to reappear. show less

This novella in the Slough House series does not include any of our favourite characters from that establishment but introduces John Bachelor. Bachelor is a "milkman" who is charged wth checking up on retired spies, in this case Benny Manors. The short format does not limit Herron, who can tell a complex spook story that stays undercover for the reader (and some of the characters) until the final pages. And then he delivers a stunning wallop. Great stuff!

John Bachelor, oddly relatable everyman of downwardly-mobile mediocrity in a cut-throat business of drive, ambition, office politics and occsional disasters, is living on the fringes of the Slough House universe, residing in a dead man's flat to avoid having to sleep in his car, drinking too much and waiting for the knock on the door to tell him the game is up. The knock comes, but it's part of a different game, to track down a someone from his milkman rounds, someone he's supposed to be meeting on a monthly basis, someone he hasn't seen for years. He doesn't know why, he's just a very tiny fish in a big pond full of predators with agendas of their own, John just wants to not get kicked out of his flat.

Another sharp, twisty, humane, show more little stab of life in a ruthless world where to suggest John is hanging on by his fingertips grants him a bit too much agency in controlling his own situation, and he knows it, too. show less

A shortie but goodie.

Set in the Slough House world we again meet John Bachelor the most unfortunate kind of spy. He’s not an agent in the field, not suit at the park or even a drone in a cubicle. He’s not even done enough to get despatched to Slough House with Jackson Lamb! He’s a milkman - a kind of care worker for aging and retired spies. His normal daily routine involves checking up on these and making sure that they don’t have aspirations to become memoir authors.

Unfortunately he’s not even well suited to that role as he finds out when ‘real’ spooks turn up at the flat he’s appropriated from a dead charge and which him off for an impromptu interrogation.

The novella then guides us through a clever tale of bluff, show more double bluff and intrigue.

It’s another excellent offering from Mick Herron complete with interweaving real news with fiction and containing the usual humour and plot twists.

A great side addition to the canon of Slough House to accompany John Bachelor’s other appearances in The Drop and The List.

You really have to feel sorry for him…each tale makes his situation worse. show less

While fans wait for the arrival of the seventh Slough House novel by British author Mick Herron, he has thrown some crumbs to his audience with a series of novellas — this being the most recent. It does not disappoint.

Continuing the story that began in two previous novellas, Herron invites us into the world of The Park and Slow House, of Lady Di and Jackson Lamb, of Milkmen, Dogs and Joes. Like John LeCarré, he has created a somewhat (though not entirely) believable world of espionage fiction set in present-day London.

One of the most enjoyable things about these books is not only the familiar characters (who are the last people on earth you’d ever want to work with, or even meet) but the clever plotting. One cannot help but wonder show more while reading them — how did I not see that one coming? And that is the genius of Herron’s spooks: they can see things that we cannot. show less

Mick Herron’s series of novels revolving around Jackson Lamb and his ‘slow horses’, the team of MI5 officers condemned to see out the rest of their service based in Slough House as punishment for past peccadilloes or momentary lapses of competence, have proved exceptionally successful. He has tapped an extraordinary vein combining humour with tightly-plotted espionage stories, and in Jackson Lamb has created one of the more horrific and grotesque characters of contemporary fiction.

In addition to the six novels in the series, he has also produced three largely overlooked novellas which have provided an intriguing back story that offers significant contextual hinterland to Joe Country, the sixth novel. The Catch is the third of show more these novellas, and picks up from The Drop, which saw John Bachelor, one of MI5’s weaker brethren, finding refuge in the flat formerly occupied by an old agent whose safety in retirement he had been supervising. Feeling that he had fallen on his feet after a lengthy run of misfortunes, Bachelor is about to have a rude awakening (literally), and find himself plunged back into the focus of the Service’s disfavour. It is difficult to say much more about the story without straying into spoiler territory.

As in the other two novellas, Jackson Lamb does not figure directly, but his shadow, ad that of Slough House, looms large. This book, like the List and The Drop, shows that Herron is adroit with the shorter format, although there is less humour than readers have come to expect from the series. The story is also alarmingly current, with clear references to current news stories. show less

Bachelor Caught in the Catch
Review of the Soho Crime paperback edition (January 28, 2020) of the John Murray hardcover original (January 14, 2020)

Anyway, never let it be said that the Service turns its back on those wounded in its employ, even when the employ is unofficial, and especially when the wounded suggests appealing to the court of public opinion, or Twitter, as it’s now known.

See photograph at https://cdn.justjared.com/wp-content/uploads/headlines/2022/04/slow-return-07.jp...
Actor Kristin Scott Thomas as MI5 Second Desk Diana Taverner in the Apple TV+ adaptations of the Slough House/Slow Horses series of books. Image sourced from JustJared.

The Slough House aka 'Slow Horse' novellas are running a parallel plot to the full show more novels of the series. I've previously read The List (#2.5 2015) and The Marylebone Drop aka The Drop (#5.5 2018). These are currently followed by The Catch (#6.5 2020), which may be the finale of the sub-series.

The main characters of the series make only cameo appearances in the novellas. Second Desk Diana Taverner is the only one of the regulars in this case, which continues the story of John Bachelor, the 'milkman'* introduced in the previous novellas.

We last saw Bachelor at the end of The Drop as he settled into deceased spy Solomon Dortmund's apartment in order to avoid becoming homeless due to his own financial downturn. He has maintained the front ever since, but is now blackmailed into looking up one of his 'retirees' from his 'milk-run'. Benny Manors is a burglar/blackmailer that the Service used only as a one-off, but who suffered an injury in the process and was given a pension in recompense. Bachelor has actually lost touch with Manors who only wanted the monthly cash but no actual contact. The pair of heavies from Regent's Park head office who seek Manors appear to be moonlighting, but Bachelor suspects that someone higher up is pulling the strings.

This was a more serious espionage plot than some of the more dark-humoured efforts in the Slough House full novels and it also added a touch of real-world crossover with the Service manipulating events in order to provide cover for a possible scandal in the Royal Family. No specific names are mentioned, but the story is obviously inspired by the Jeffrey Epstein/Prince Andrew connections.

Trivia and Link
* In Mick Herron's invented spy jargon a 'milkman' is "a retirement-needs evaluation counselor, otherwise known as a babysitter of former spies living out their remaining lives wherever MI5 resettled them," according to the Slough House glossary at SpyWrite.com. show less