In Spook Street, the fourth novel in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series of spy novels, he describes London as “a class-A city … except for the parts that weren’t, which were like someone had taken all the worst bits of everywhere else and shored them up against each other. And the traffic was a f*****g nightmare.”
That’s as good an introduction as any to the bleak, post-Brexit metropolis wherein MI5’s ragtag B-team of spies — who carry the unglamorous moniker of “Slow Horses” in Herron’s stories — fling themselves up against one catastrophe after another that’s well above their pay grade. In Spook Street, that mystery entails the aforementioned spies working to figure out who detonated a bomb in the middle of a busy London shopping center, killing scores of people — and it’s this installment of the book series that also serves as the basis for the fourth season of Slow Horses, Apple TV+’s critically acclaimed spy drama that returns on Sept. 4.
“We’re all targets, just like old times,” Gary Oldman’s slovenly, misanthropic, and deceptively brilliant spymaster Jackson Lamb laments at one point during the new season, the first trailer for which Apple released today.
Lamb is the paunchy, chain-smoking agency veteran in charge of Slough House, the outpost of washed-up spies who get sent there because they’ve all either committed major infractions or pissed off the wrong higher-ups. When asked whether that means he’s nominally in charge of the agency’s “rejects,” Lamb dismisses the question in a huff: “They don’t like being called that.”
What do you call them, then? “The rejects.”
Lamb is always quick to deploy withering barbs like that one to any and all, but especially to the misfits condemned by MI5 to the agency’s musty and rotting Slough House — which, in point of fact, is a clever invention by Herron that turns everything familiar about the spy genre on its head. Instead of spies that look and act like superheroes, in other words, the Slow Horses herein very much live up to their name by generally sucking at their job but still managing to surprise from time to time.
One thing that particularly excites me about Season 4 of this fan-favorite Apple series is that we’ll get to spend more time with a heretofore criminally underused side character.
David Cartwright — a legendary former spy himself, as well as grandfather to tryhard Jackson Lamb understudy River Cartwright — will have a much larger role this time around. The elder Cartwright slowly starts to lose his mind as a result of dementia, something we’ve already seen little hints of before now. The younger Cartwright has to wrestle with his grandfather’s insistence that someone is trying to kill him while at the same getting to the bottom of the shopping center bombing that actually killed scores of people.
As if all that wasn’t enough, Cartwright also stumbles onto a conspiracy that connects the bombing to his grandfather’s past. In other words: What dark and twisted intrigue awaits on Spook Street.
