Real Tigers (Slough House book 3) by Mick Herron (book review)
Unravelling the opening sequence of the third ‘Slough House’ book, ‘Real Tigers’, has a lot of threads, the opening one not making sense until half-way through the book. The important one is 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. Maybe not as successfully as he believes. All Jackson Lamb knows is Standish is missing and sent Louisa Guy to track her movements. Cartwright doesn’t get away with his theft and is caught and more than grilled by the chief dog, Nick Duffy, but has his guts get a thumping.
Dame Ingrid Tearney, the head of MI5, discovers that her boss, the Home Secretary Peter Judd, had set a team of tigers, slang for a 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, second desk Diane Tavener is up to her neck and stirring things up along way but, then, 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, the paranoid stuff, now located at an outhouse suppository and Slough House has to get them inside to get it. 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 is 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 than shown first hand from time to time. The latter third of the book goes back into regular time…mostly.
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 hospital and gone by the end. In the TV series, he is more integrated to fill a particular spot. Some spots are still left in. Who wouldn’t want to drive a bus through the front of a house? There’s still a lot of words used to conceal actual activities or things. This time Scott and Virgil and used for different secured files, taken directly from ‘Thunderbirds’ but the Beetles are used on TV. This isn’t new using various odd codewords. You can see them used in LeCarre’s Smiley novels to even TV’s ‘The Sandbaggers’. It’s like an open code to show you’re on the inside. It isn’t the Black Arrow private security but Chieftain. In fact, the only area where Herron deviates is calling state security ‘MI5’, as even they don’t do that but 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. The people who abduct Standish are also no one she knows this time. From then on, elements from the book are reinstated. Well, apart from Tavener has had a slight downgrade. 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/
