Real Tigers (Slough House book 3) by Mick Herron (book review).
Unravelling the opening sequence of the third ‘Slough House’ book, ‘Real Tigers’, involves many threads, with the first one not making sense until halfway through the book. The important one is that Catherine Standish has been kidnapped, and a photo of her imprisonment has been used to push River Cartwright into breaking into Regent’s Park to photograph a particular file in their archive.
Of course, he can’t tell them that, but he’s trained in how to break into places. He may not be as successful as he thinks he is. All Jackson Lamb knows is that Standish is missing and that Louisa Guy was sent to track her movements. Cartwright doesn’t escape his theft; he is caught and thoroughly interrogated by the chief dog, Nick Duffy, who gives him a severe beating.
Dame Ingrid Tearney, the head of MI5, discovers that her boss, the Home Secretary Peter Judd, had set a team of tigers, slang for freelance security, Black Arrow this time, on the Park to shake them up and get rid of Slough House. The only problem is its leader’s body gets dumped outside a restaurant where Judd is eating, and the tigers are doing more than playing. Of course, Diane Tavener, who holds the second desk position, is deeply involved and stirring up trouble along the way, but then again, who can you trust in the spy business?
Things aren’t what they seem with various people playing different games. The tigers want the grey files, which contain paranoid information and are currently located at an outhouse suppository, and Slough House needs to retrieve them to access that information. From there on, your security clearance isn’t high enough, so you’ll have to read the book.
It’s an unusual aspect of this book: scenes in the first third of ‘Real Tigers’ seemed to be jumped as if Herron had to bring the page count down, and events are referred to rather than shown firsthand from time to time. The latter third of the book mostly returns to a regular timeline.
It’s when it comes to comparing this story to the third season of ‘Slow Dogs’ on TV that much of it has changed. In the book version, James ‘Spider’ Webb is half-dead in the hospital and gone by the end. In the TV series, he is more integrated, filling a particular spot. Some spots are still left in. Who wouldn’t want to drive a bus through the front of a house? There are still many words used to conceal actual activities or things. This time Scott and Virgil are used for different secured files, taken directly from ‘Thunderbirds’, but the Beetles are used on TV. This type of disguise isn’t new, using various odd codewords. You can see them used in Le Carré’s Smiley novels and even in TV’s The Sandbaggers’. It functions as an unmistakable indicator of insider status. The private security service in question is not Black Arrow but rather Chieftain. The only place Herron diverges is calling state security “MI5,” which is easily identified for the reader.
This TV story is a lot dirtier, and you really have to do a body count at the end to see who survives.
The opening sequence of the TV story is totally changed to someone with a secret document passing it to someone else before dying in Singapore. This time, Standish doesn’t recognise the people abducting her. From then on, elements from the book are reinstated. Apart from Tavener, who has experienced a slight downgrade, everything remains unchanged. If anything, breaking the story into six episodes must have been a lot harder, and for my second viewing, I had to resist watching the last episodes one after another.
Both work so you won’t miss anything.
GF Willmetts
August 2025
(pub: Baskerville, 2016. 361 page enlarged paperback. Price: varies but cheaper in a wrap-pack. ISBN: 978-1-39980-329-8).
check out website: www.johnmurraypress.co.uk/landing-page/baskerville-imprint/
