Anyone who has tried their hand at both novels and short stories will probably agree: from a craft perspective, they require significantly different writing modes. Mick Herron strikes me as a natural novelist, rhtymically, the flow of his prose brisk enough to tie threads together while still creating depth and texture with entertaining banter, tangents, and digressions. While Herron’s Slough House collection Standing by the Wall provides strong evidence that Herron also excels at shorter lengths, I wondered as I was reading it if I was coasting on the residual energy of his rich, addictive spy series.
Well, surprise, Dolphin Junction serves up more evidence that Herron can bring the goods at any length. Every bit as zippy and engaging as his Slow Horses tales, this collection serves up eleven fun, fast-paced puzzlers, most of which debuted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The only one I had previously read was “The Last Dead Letter,” a Slough House standalone featuring Jackson Lamb and Molly Doran, which I read again with pleasure, but I’ll focus on the new (to me) material.
If there is an anchoring presence in Dolphin Junction, it may be Zoë Boehm, the shrewd, no-nonsense private investigator of Herron’s Oxford series of mystery novels, which pre-date the advent of Slough House. Four of the stories feature Zoë, her throwback husband-slash-partner Joe Silvermann, or both. All four are good advertisements for that series (an inevitable future read, at this rate), with “Proof of Love” and “Mirror Images” centering Joe’s earnest, clumsy approach to detective work, while “The Other Half” and “What We Do” spotlight the more capable (and much more cynical) Zoë. The standalone stories are uniformly entertaining, with “Dolphin Junction,” “Remote Control” and “Lost Luggage” conjuring something of an Alfred Hitchcock Presents vibe in their deployment of self-contained plot twists, while “An American Fridge” and “The Usual Santas” are oddball tales that spin charming humor into their intrigue. The standout story for me, though, was “All the Livelong Day,” a chilling slow-burn about a young couple whose hiking trip spirals into nightmare. A nuanced character conflict that unfolds its mystery against a backdrop of a disintegrating marriage, this one perhaps betrays Herron’s prediliction for novel-length pacing, but it’s in service to superb, steadily escalating suspense.
Dolphin Junction may not be a particularly weighty collection, nor does it have the immersive satirical impact of the Slough House universe. It’s nonetheless rife with many of the author’s signature pleasures: insightful humor, twisty intrigue, and breathless page-turning. I basically inhaled this one.
Anyone who has tried their hand at both novels and short stories will probably agree: from a craft perspective, they require significantly different writing modes. Mick Herron strikes me as a natural novelist, rhtymically, the flow of his prose brisk enough to tie threads together while still creating depth and texture with entertaining banter, tangents, and digressions. While Herron’s Slough House collection Standing by the Wall provides strong evidence that Herron also excels at shorter lengths, I wondered as I was reading it if I was coasting on the residual energy of his rich, addictive spy series.
