Standing by the Wall is a 2022 novella by Mick Herron, a spy story connected to his Jackson Lamb novels.
The story is as "a Slough House interlude". Slough House is where British security service MI6 sends its unwanted staff. The ones who are inconvenient, incompetent or unreliable, but can't simply be fired. Once assigned there, under the command of embittered Cold War veteran Jackson Lamb, they're mocked and given pointless tasks until they resign, or retire.
Slough House is not a happy place. And especially not at Christmas.
- Breather Episode: There's no violence and none of Lamb's Slow Horses are injured or killed. Given the cast turnover of previous novels, it feels like a moment of calm between the storms. Even Herron's previous novellas set in The 'Verse, the John Bachelor series, have tended to involve deaths or some level of brutality.
- The Bus Came Back: River Cartwright, who was poisoned in a previous book and completely absent from the most recent one, Bad Actors, is slowly recovering and returns to visit Slough House. Bad Actors left his recovery very much in doubt.
- Sequel Hook: The ending leads into Herron's novel The Secret Hours (not yet released when Standing by the Wall was published) revealing that it's part of The 'Verse after all. Up to this point, pre-release publicity had suggested that The Secret Hours was a standalone novel.
- Un-person: A variant. Lamb asks Roddy to carefully edit an old photo so that one of the three people pictured in it is removed without trace. Afterwards, in a vicious mood, he also asks Roddy to edit out the legs of the young woman standing in the photo, leaving her torso floating in the air. The woman in the photo is Molly Doran, who sent Jackson the photo - and is now a much older double-amputee, who lost her legs at some point after it was taken.
