Reading time: About 2 minutes
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes and metaphors from Mick Herron…
Mick Herron is a British mystery and thriller novelist. He is the author of the Slough House series, early novels of that have been adapted into the Slow Horses television series. He won the Crime Writers’ Association 2013 Gold Dagger for Dead Lions and the Diamond Dagger in 2025 for lifetime achievement.
Although I’d streamed the first season of Slow Horses, I’d read none of Herron’s work, so I picked up his 2023 spy thriller The Secret Hours. His sense of humour and his figurative language blew me away.
Here are my favourite examples:
- He was on his mobile as he entered, his tone curt and businesslike, and his greeting to Griselda was engineered via eyebrows alone.
- Paranoia was parasitical; it dug its talons in and fed off what it found.
- A rational bureaucracy would have applied the brakes, but the wheels of Westminster were like the wheels on the bus: they went round and round, and round and round, all day long.
- The alarm didn’t wake Griselda because she’d been awake for some while, a familiar carousel of worry spinning her round the same old circuit until she felt like uncollected baggage.
- It was like trying to seal a dam with Elastoplast.
- His shoes, she imagined, would be buffed to mirrordom.
- Like any large organisation, Regent’s Park ran on rumour, except when it was flying on legend.
- A mixture of Rasputin and Robespierre, it was said, though in person he looked kindlier than either description suggested.
- This did not go unnoticed on their return to the Station House, where Theresa — who had thawed a little, but only enough to show Alison that underneath the ice lay permafrost — let her know that it had been nothing personal
- Around them, conversation bubbled like eggs in a pan.
- Shirin Mansoor has a persistent dry cough, never shaken off after a bout of Covid—“the Omicron variant,” she insists on specifying, as if this were an upmarket brand, more in keeping with her status.
- Her hair was tied back, and she wore spectacles, as if in conscious homage to a stereotype.
- Traitors grow old, they die, and their sins are laid out like a carpet.
- Daylight had slipped away, to hide in corners until needed, and grey evening was on the city like a damp cloth over a cage.
[Photo credit: ©Tim Duncan. Cropped. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.]
