Mick Gerron has been called the “John Le Carré of our time” and the new hope of British literature, and has been compared to Raymond Chandler and Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Elmore Leonard and Joseph Heller. Gerron’s novels are “a funny, bordering on farce, amazingly cynical caricature of politicians, functionaries, internecine squabbling and the Great Game” (Booklist), and his heroes (“lame horses”, aka weaklings from the Slow Tower) are counterintelligence officers who have failed, punished “for addiction to drugs, alcohol or debauchery; for intrigue and betrayal; for dissatisfaction and doubts; and also for an unforgivable oversight." Overseeing them is Jackson Lamb, “the Falstaff of our day” (Sunday Times) and “one of the most monstrous characters in modern literature” (Bernard Cornwell). In the second novel in the series, Dead Lions, an old acquaintance of Lamb's from his time in Berlin, a former informer named Dickie Bowe, dies on a bus near Oxford; and not only does his death look suspicious, but on his mobile phone Lam finds an unsent message with one word: “Cicadas.” This means that there is a possibility that the mythical agent network of deep secrecy is not so mythical. But MI5 has no time for that, counterintelligence is paralyzed by “an audit that is more reminiscent of the Inquisition,” and it’s up to Lamb and his “lame horses” to deal with the “Cicadas” and their mythical (or is it not mythical?) leader...According to the first books series “Slough Tower”, a television series was launched into production (two seasons at once), filming took place in 2020–2021. The role of Jackson Lam was played by Gary Oldman; the series also starred Jack Lowden, Olivia Cooke, Jonathan Pryce, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Christopher Cheung. The first season was directed by James Hawes (“Merlin”, “Black Mirror”, “Doctor Who”, “The Alienist”, “Raised by Wolves”). For the first time in Russian!