Dead Lions, by Mick Herron

How do you bring an audience up to speed on the story so far?

I posted in April that the surviving episode of children's adventure serial Garry Halliday (from 1960) begins with a minute-long recap, showing stills of 10 different characters and detailing multiple twists. As I said, we can compare that to the opening moments of a rare, surviving episode of soap opera Compact (from 1962), where there's no narrated recap but everything we need to know is relayed concisely in the opening scene.

The second Slow Horses novel bring us up to speed from the perspective of an imaginary cat stalking the offices of Slough House floor by floor, describing the disgraced intelligence operatives working there. That includes the two new characters replacing characters killed in the first novel. It's a bold conceit for a series grounded in the grubbily, boringly and compellingly real and could fast become wearying. But, kept to just an introductory sequence and used to delineate the distinctive features of each of the main characters, I think Mick Herron gets away with it.

The sequence ends with a pen portrait of slovenly Jackson Lamb on the top floor who would, if the cat really existed, throw it out of the window to its death. The point is that Lamb is quicker and more ruthless than he might appear, and in the story that follows his long experience and cynical perspective mean he's the one intelligence operative not to be fooled...

Once again, the TV version - which I came to first - is a very close adaptation of the book, the main difference that a final confrontation with a baddie involves young River Cartwright in the book and Jackson Lamb on TV. River was the protagonist of the first book and TV series, but we're already seeing the focus shift. It's the same phenomenon, I think, as Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation or President Bartlett in The West Wing. Each was originally envisioned as a kind of guest star who'd appear infrequently to offer wise counsel, while the focus was on the ordinary staff getting into scrapes and adventures. The issue, I think, is that the authority of such characters exerts something like gravitational force, and the more a series continues, the more it is drawn to that power.

The novel ends with another tour of Slough House, this time from the perspective of a mouse. It's effectively the punchline to a book-long joke. I wasn't at first sure whether this was another hypothetical creature but it turns out to be real - and prompts Jackson Lamb to wonder if they need a cat.