Category Thrillers

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Books, Culture, Fiction, John Banville, Sách & Tri thức, Thrillers

Venetian Vespers by John Banville review – a haunting honeymoon

This brooding tale of an Englishman’s downfall in fin-de-siècle Venice is memorably eerie – but it’s hard to care about such a pompous protagonist

Many years ago, a sober-minded friend warned me off going to Venice for the first time with my then partner. He muttered ominous things about the Venice wobble and the Venice curse. I went anyway and I have to say he had a point. It was autumn and there was something deeply uncanny about the city: fog-bound canals, labyrinthine alleyways, a general sense of decay. If my minibreak had belonged to a literary genre, it wouldn’t have been romance so much as cosmic horror.

Fiction, of course, should have prepared me. Couples have been coming unstuck in Venice since Othello and Desdemona. There are the Baxters in Daphne du Maurier’s short story Don’t Look Now, the basis for Nicolas Roeg’s unforgettably creepy film; Mary and Colin in The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan – the city’s not named in the novel, but it’s clearly the setting. And while the love affair in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice exists only in Von Aschenbach’s mind, the city is still his undoing. To Von Aschenbach and the others, we can now add the name of the unfortunate Evelyn Dolman, the protagonist of John Banville’s new novel, Venetian Vespers. Evelyn is a hack writer from England who has recently married an American heiress called Laura Rensselaer. Their plans to honeymoon in Venice have been delayed by the unexpected death of Laura’s father, the industrialist T Willard Rensselaer. In the wintry early months of 1900, they finally arrive and take up residence in the sinister Palazzo Dioscuri, a stone’s throw from St Mark’s. Dioscuri means the Twins – Castor and Pollux – and it will be a pair of twins who set in motion Evelyn’s inexorable but unforeseeable downfall.

thanhtoong0
September 25, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức, Slow Horses, Thrillers

Clown Town by Mick Herron review – more fun and games with the Slow Horses

The ninth novel in the Slough House series, this tale of IRA infiltration is a perfect mix of one-liners, plot twists and real-world-tinged intrigue

Trigger warning: the new Slough House novel shares its name, I assume accidentally, with a particularly bleak soft-play centre on London’s North Circular Road in which sticky under-fives circulate through an infernal apparatus wailing and stabbing each other with plastic forks while the grownups sit at plastic tables drinking horrible coffee and waiting for death. Just a glimpse at the dust jacket sent me back a decade to that environment of grubbiness, boredom and mild peril. It’s not that big a leap, mind. There’s something of the knockabout quality of a soft-play centre in Mick Herron’s fictional world: all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

That said, as far as I know, none of the injuries in the real-world Clown Town will have been occasioned by the victim being held down so the front wheel of a Land Rover Defender can be driven over their head – which is the attention-grabbing scene with which Herron opens this latest instalment. As often, Herron’s plot takes off from real-world events: the Stakeknife scandal – in which it turned out that MI5 had been protecting a murderously vicious IRA enforcer as an intelligence asset – appears here in the story of Pitchfork, whose signature “nutting” technique of killing during the Troubles was running over people’s heads.

What you see when you see a blank page is much what you hear when you hear white noise; it’s the early shifting into gear of something not ready to happen – an echo of what you feel when you walk past sights the eyes are blind to; bus queues, whitewashed shopfronts, adverts pasted to lamp-posts, or a four-storey block on Aldersgate Street in the London borough of Finsbury, where the premises gracing the pavement include a Chinese restaurant with ever-lowered shutters and a faded menu taped to its window; a down-at-heel newsagent’s where pallets of off-brand cola cans block the aisle; and, between the two, a weathered black door with a dusty milk bottle welded to its step, and an air of neglect suggesting that it never opens, never closes.

thanhtoong0
September 18, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Richard Osman, Sách & Tri thức, Thrillers

Post your questions for Richard Osman and Mick Herron

The bestselling authors of The Thursday Murder Club and the Slough House series will take on your questions

Richard Osman and Mick Herron have cracked the code to writing thrillers that captivate audiences. During his stellar career in television, Osman presented the hugely popular gameshows Pointless, which he also created, and Richard Osman’s House of Games. More recently he has illuminated the world of show business with the Guardian’s Marina Hyde on The Rest is Entertainment podcast. Five years ago, he published the first instalment of The Thursday Murder Club, in which four retirees – former spy Elizabeth, psychiatrist Ibrahim, trade union leader Ron and nurse Joyce – pit their wits against assorted murderers and ne’er-do-wells, aided and abetted by canny builder Bogdan and a sometimes reluctant local police force. The fifth in the series, The Impossible Fortune, is out this September – just a few weeks after Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan and Celia Imrie played the amateur detectives in the first film adaptation of the series.

The first in Mick Herron’s Slough House series appeared 15 years ago, with an intriguing conceit at its heart: what happens to spies who have messed up on the job? Leading Herron’s group of undercover misfits is Jackson Lamb, whose thoroughly unappealing exterior conceals a steeltrap mind and a strong moral code. The undercover agents made the transition to screen in an award-winning AppleTV+ series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Jack Lowden, with an original theme tune by Herron fan Mick Jagger. Clown Town, the ninth book in the series, is out now, and sees Lamb and his team, including stalwart sidekicks River Cartwright (Lowden) and Catherine Standish, once again battling against the establishment.

thanhtoong0
September 15, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức, Slow Horses, Television & radio, Thrillers

Slow Horses author Mick Herron: ‘I love doing things that are against the rules’

As the hit thriller returns to our screens, its creator talks about false starts, surprise inspirations – and why he never looks inside Jackson Lamb’s head

It is hard to imagine anyone less like the slovenly, has-been MI5 agent Jackson Lamb than his creator, Mick Herron. “He must come deep out of my subconscious,” the 62-year-old thriller writer jokes, sipping mineral water at a rooftop bar in his home city of Oxford, a world away from London’s Aldersgate where his bestselling Slough House series is set. In a “blue shirt, white tee” (fans will get the reference), he is softly spoken with a hint of a Geordie accent. Herron is often described as the heir to John le Carré and “the best spy novelist of his generation”, according to the New Yorker. Unlike le Carré, he’s not, and never has been, a spy. Mysteriously, though, Wikipedia has given him “an entirely fictitious” birthday. “I got cards. I got a cake,” he says.

For the uninitiated, the novels and award-winning TV series follow a bunch of misfit spooks exiled to Slough House from MI5 for various mishaps and misdemeanours, so far away from the shiny HQ in Regent’s Park that it may as well be in Slough. The joke is that these hapless underdogs (nicknamed “slow horses”), under the grubby reins of Lamb, always triumph over the slicker agents and “the Dogs” at the Park.

thanhtoong0
September 6, 2025