“Roddy Ho is used to being the one the slow horses turn to when they need miracles performed, and he’s always been Jackson Lamb’s Number Two. So when Lamb has a photograph that needs doctoring, it’s Ho he entrusts with the task. Christmas is a time for memories, but Lamb doesn’t do memories – or so he says. But what is it about the photo that makes him want to alter it? How would the slow horses cope if Roddy Ho did not exist? And most importantly of all, are the team having Christmas drinks, and if so, where?
Standing by the Wall is (currently) the last novella that Slough House creator Mick Herron has written. Here we see Roddy Ho, the teams punching bag (99.0% deserved) of weirdness and (in Ho’s mind), Jackson Lamb’s Number Two, the Q to this small clown car of slow horses, the apparent lynchpin for Slough Houses entire “success”, demanded by Lamb to alter a photograph of three people. Basically remove the center figure. Who that person is –that’s not revealed- but the one on the left is a much younger Jackson Lamb and the other Molly Doran, the Park’s archivist and –perhaps- Lamb’s only friend.
The other part is a setup for the return of River Cartwright, who was apparently left for dead at the end of book seven. We learn that River was dosed with novichok, a family of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union and Russia between 1971 and 1993. He’s still has a few weeks left before returning to duty, but because it was Christmas, he felt this was a good chance to see his friends and meet the newest recruit, Ashley. But it’s clear he has some reservations here, mostly because his relationship with Sid has grown.
There is also, apparently a reference to Operation Monochrome, which appears to be link to his stand-alone spy thriller Secret Hours.
Otherwise, Lamb is Lamb and it’ll be interesting if this picture will tie into a later novel. But it also serves as another glimpse into Lamb’s murky past.
Which bring me to the short story Last Dead Letter (which is set just after David Cartwright’s funeral in the novel Joe Country). Here is another glimpse into Lamb’s past.
”Molly Dornan is there waiting to extract her pound of flesh from Jackson Lamb for an earlier favor. In this case, it’s learning the truth to a story Dornan has found in her precious archives. She’s put most of the pieces together but needs Lamb for the last bits of the puzzle. Molly enjoys closing off those unknown loops in her files wherever possible. The tale she tells is of “Dominic Cross”, an agent runner in Berlin, he’s a little crooked and drinks too much but always looks after his joes. Cross is a veteran of the spy game, but been in Berlin too long. He makes the misjudgment that many spies seem to make – he falls in love. When the Stasi opposition finds a way to turn this against him the question becomes whether he can find a way out of the devil’s choice he’s been given. Does he choose the life of his lover or his joe?”
For a short story, the Last Dead Letter gives us a lot of information to parse through. Here Herron creates a pretty good atmosphere of Cold War Berlin and as you read, you get a sense that this Cross is really Lamb (but while the whole series is just a variation on themes presented before, I had hoped that this was one trope Herron would avoid – the British spy who falls for the German spy). And I can guess this was Herron’s attempt at giving his long-time readers, who are eager to learn of more of Lamb’s life before Slough House, a reason to read the tale. But there is a twist, as always, and we learn really nothing more beyond the fact that even some forty years earlier, Cross called his watcher The Shit.
Like all the novellas and this short story, they are not necessary reads. But for those completists out there, these tales are like bits of candy in small packages, but sometimes, usually at the end, they turn tart.
