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.
“In its bare headlines, it’s not that promising is it?” Herron says modestly. “A bunch of people who aren’t very good at their jobs and don’t like each other, forced to work in an office. I mean, why would you want to read it?” It’s great fun, for starters. In a genre dominated by sinister psychological dramas and slick spin-offs, Herron’s mix of high jeopardy, low comedy and political satire might be described as a breath of fresh air, if the air in Slough House was not fetid with farts and frustration. Will Smith, co-writer of The Thick of It and Veep, was the ideal person to bring Herron’s world to the screen: Lamb is MI5’s Malcom Tucker, only dirtier. A cold war wreck, held together by booze, fags and loyalty to his “joes”, Lamb is one of the great characters of contemporary fiction. Like a modern-day Falstaff or Fagin, he is now part of the public imagination, thanks to an affectionate portrayal by Gary Oldman alongside a regally icy Kristin Scott Thomas as MI5 chief Diana Taverner in the TV show.
This autumn, Oldman and co return with season five, based on the fifth Slough House novel, London Rules. On the back of its success, Apple TV+ will also launch an adaptation of Herron’s lesser-known 2003 debut Down Cemetery Road, with Emma Thompson as Oxford private detective Zoë Boehm. And this week, the author publishes the ninth in the Slough House series, Clown Town.
The new novel is inspired by the true story of an IRA informant and murderer, codenamed Stakeknife, real name Freddie Scappaticci. “An appalling human being”, Herron says, who was given protection by the British intelligence services in the 70s and 80s, in one of “the most morally dubious operations that the intelligence services had been involved in”, as one senior civil servant told him. Perfect Herron material. Players in the Slough House novels tread the murky line between protecting the nation and the interests of GCHQ. Stakeknife died “peacefully in his bed” in 2023 after Herron was well under way with Clown Town. The author didn’t stick too closely to historical events. “It hampers the imagination,” he says. “Also, I’m quite lazy when it comes to research.”
Clown Town opens with a leftwing government finding its feet, a PM with a penchant for designer specs and “who happens to be a lawyer”, says Herron. There might be a new broom at No 10, but the dark corners of the British establishment are as grimy as ever. “I’m writing about how power corrupts,” he says. “It’s hardly an original observation, but it doesn’t matter who’s in power. Things are going to go wrong, either wilfully or by cock-up. I’m more prone towards the cock-up view of history than I am conspiracy, but that doesn’t alter the effect.”
Herron may not have any experience of working for the intelligence service, but he has done his time in an office. “In many ways, I’m writing more about office life than about spies,” he says. “The intelligence service is essentially a big office. They’ll have a kitchen with fridges. The same things are going to happen as in any other office. I imagine,” he adds. James Bond it is not.
Getting Herron to admit his books have been a runaway hit is like trying to persuade Lamb to take a shower. “Failure is always more interesting to me than success,” he maintains. “It would be stupid to deny that I am now successful, but I was that far away from being a failure,” he says, holding his thumb and forefinger together. “It could all have gone very differently. I was very lucky.”
His is one of the great success stories of recent publishing history: an inspiration to slow horses everywhere. On his walk to the office of the legal journal where he worked as a subeditor for many years, he would pass an unhappy-looking building on Aldersgate Street. “I didn’t know I was going to write a book, let alone a series of books about it,” he says, of what would become Slough House. “I’ve been ‘living’ there ever since.” It is the very building on the TV show. “They went the extra mile there. They could have shown any building; they didn’t.” On the train back to Oxford each evening he would mull over his ideas so that by the time he got home, he knew exactly where he was going. “I had an hour of work in me,” he says, which averaged 360 words a day.
After trying his hand at poetry and literary fiction, he turned to crime with his Zoë Boehm series. On 7 July 2005 he was waiting on the platform at Paddington when the bomb exploded at Edgware Road, one tube stop away. “You don’t have to know anything about politics to be a victim of political terror, to have bombs go off around you,” he says. “That made me realise I could write about events like that without necessarily understanding how they would come about.” So he changed tack and started writing espionage novels.
Slow Horses was published in 2010. But he couldn’t find a UK publisher for its sequel, Dead Lions, a couple of years later. “What even is this?” one publisher asked, unable to work out if it was a thriller or a comedy. “The books didn’t sell at first,” Herron says mildly now. “It didn’t surprise me. I wasn’t wailing and gnashing my teeth or anything. I was just getting on with my life.”
An editor at John Murray happened to pick up Slow Horses at Liverpool Street station and decided to back it. The first two novels were republished in 2015. The following year, Herron took a four-month sabbatical to try writing fiction full time. By 11am of the first morning he knew he could do it and on his return to the office he handed in his notice.
But it was in 2016 that things really took off. “It was Brexit,” the author says definitively. “The country’s misfortune was my good luck.” His post-referendum novel London Rules was published in 2018. Suddenly, his populist floppy-haired, bicycle-riding MP, Peter Judd, seemed all too familiar. The echoes between PJ and BJ were impossible to ignore. Herron was at Balliol College, Oxford at the same time as Boris Johnson, not part of the Bullingdon set. “PJ was just my sort of rightwing bogeyman figure,” he says now. “Public-school educated, a sense of entitlement, self-obsession, complete disregard for ethics or morality or integrity.” He looks over the rooftops and their old college. “I mean, Boris Johnson fits that,” he says. “But so do many other politicians.”
Just as le Carré’s novels resonated with the disillusionment and failure of the 70s, Herron captured the anger and frustration felt by many across the country. By the time the TV series launched in 2022, he was in full control of his material. “I’m more popular now, but I don’t feel that I’ve disconnected from the characters because of that,” he says. “When I sit down to write, I still feel like exactly the same person I’ve always been.”
Growing up in Newcastle upon Tyne, the fourth child in a Catholic family of six, Herron describes his childhood as a happy one. His father was an optician, his mother a nursery school teacher who taught him to read before he started school. He read obsessively, preferring a fictional world to reality. “There was nothing wrong with the real world,” he says, “but I’d certainly rather have read a story than been at school.”
In 1979 he sat down with his parents to watch the TV serialisation of le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He was hooked. The next day he borrowed a copy from his local library. He watched the BBC’s 1982 adaptation of Smiley’s People on a tiny portable black-and-white TV in a student house in Oxford. It is almost too neat a twist that Oldman played Smiley in the 2011 film.
“He was exactly the right novelist to be writing his books at that time,” Herron says of le Carré. “He saw the Berlin Wall going up. That was a gift to all of us. Brexit doesn’t compare,” he says, brushing off any parallels with his own historical moment.
Le Carré’s fingerprints are all over Slough House: the bookish ex-MI5 top brass David Cartwright is surely a homage to David Cornwell (le Carré’s real name). Rereading Smiley’s People, Herron was delighted to spot a foul-mouthed taxi driver called J Lamb, lurking in his subconscious all those years.
Lamb was born, Herron says, out of “an unfiltered love of language”. He is the only character into whose mind the author doesn’t venture. To know if he means the outrageous things he says would be to “render the character useless”, Herron says. “Either he’s an absolutely despicable human being or he’s just pretending.” Some readers assumed he was a mouthpiece for Herron’s own views and sent him vile letters in support. Jumping between the different characters’ perspectives – Lamb’s faithful secretary Catherine Standish and tech geek Roddy Ho are his favourites – makes the reader work harder and is against all the rules of creative writing, the author points out. “And I love doing things that are against the rules.”
One of which is killing off your core characters, even one of the good guys such as Min Harper. He wants the reader to have a sense that “nobody’s safe”. But it isn’t just for shocks. “It was about grief,” he says. His father died a few years before he started writing the series, but the decision was mainly a literary one. “I thought: I’ve got these people now. If I kill one of them, how are the others going to feel?”
During lockdown Herron moved in with his partner Jo Howard (a publishing headhunter) and now writes in his old flat. His commute is a 10-minute walk and he aims for between 500 and 600 words a day. Like Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen, he doesn’t have a smartphone and there’s no wifi. “We hang out and fax each other,” he shoots back. More unusually, he reads throughout the day. “I can go straight from the laptop to the sofa,” he says. “I’m a reader before I’m a writer. Reading words keeps my brain alert.”
He doesn’t have to worry about money like he used to, and he gets to meet other writers, “which is great fun”. But for the most part, he leads a quiet life with Howard and their two cats (if he were a spy the cats would be his soft spots). Howard is his first reader, but he never discusses a book until it’s finished. She is a keen walker, and can tell when he hits a tricky point in a novel by his pace. “I’m a plodder,” he says of his writing.
At the moment he is working on a non-Slow Horses novel. “It’s about spies,” he reveals, helpfully. “I like writing genre stuff,” he says. “I like having that structure. I like knowing that a book is going to have an actual ending rather than just stop.”
He was surprised to discover how much he enjoyed being part of the writers’ room for the TV series. “I never felt particularly collaborative even when I was in an office.” He will miss showrunner Smith, who recently announced that season five would be his last.
Herron even had a couple of cameo appearances. You would be forgiven for not spotting him and Howard in the first episode, coming out of Lamb’s favourite Chinese restaurant. In season four, they are leaving a hotel. He got to hail a taxi, he says, repeating the action now. They each had their own trailers. Could he ever have imagined such a scenario? “There was never a moment in my previous life where I thought this was possible,” he says.
Seasons five and six are in the can (the latter based on two novels, Joe Country and Slough House). Filming of season seven, adapting Bad Actors, is due to begin this month, which leaves only Clown Town to be adapted. Does he have an endgame in sight?
“There’s an awareness that there should be an endgame.” But there’s no danger he’s putting his horses out to grass for a while yet. He was tempted to blow up Slough House at the end of the first novel, to close with Lamb and Standish, the only survivors, running away on a ferry. “That didn’t happen,” he deadpans. “It would have been a good ending, actually. But my life would be very different.”
