The well-written spy novel is not a hotly contested field. Le Carré, Fleming, Deighton, a few Greenes, and that’s largely it. However, we now have a new contender: Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series.

It was a brief but intriguing review in the TLS that first alerted me to the books, with their sidelined spooks, contemptuously nicknamed ‘slow horses’, sent to an oubliette next to the Barbican on having screwed up, and their appalling boss, the veteran Jackson Lamb, a monster of flatulence, astonishing drinking habits and withering put-downs (on requesting ‘an educated guess’, he says, on hearing what’s offered: ‘I said...