I suppose Mick Herron is now famous. He’s not famous like Lady Gaga is famous. But the superb Slow Horses novels, now a popular Apple TV+ series, have granted him what we might call writer fame. He is not mobbed in the pub. But millions wait eagerly to hear what he will do next with his characters.
“Yes, I call it ‘book famous’,” he agrees with a smile.
He is now 62. Slow Horses, the first in the series about failed spies working from a grubby London office at the end of an unfashionable block, emerged in 2010, but it took another three or four years for the books to really register. By the time of the pandemic they’d gone beyond cult status. Does he regret not becoming “book famous” earlier in life?
“No, no, this is the right way around,” he says. “I’m very happy with this. If it had happened at an earlier stage, if Slow Horses had been filmed the moment the book hit the shelves, that would have left me in a very different place. That was my sixth novel. If my first book had been a success I doubt we’d be talking to each other now. I might have burned out one way or the other.”
READ MORE
Nothing about the current Mick Herron suggests the younger version would have collapsed into indulgent dissolution. Drily amusing, capable of speaking in complete paragraphs, he comes across as the most level-headed of men. He will need those communication skills throughout a bumper month for Slow Horses fans. This month Gary Oldman returns as Jackson Lamb, slovenly head of MI5’s Slough House purgatory, in the fifth season of the Apple show. Before that we get Clown Town, the ninth book in the series. Both are up to the standards of their predecessors.
Something struck me during my recent total immersion in literary and televisual Herron. The author is ruthless in killing off his most popular characters. Before the TV series came along there was no moral quandary there. Does he now worry that when one of the crew buys the farm this means, a few series later, an actor will be out of a job?
“That is the kind of thing that I have to close my mind to,” he says. “I can’t allow considerations about that to get in the way of writing the novel that I want to write. But, in reality, the actors are doing very well out of Slow Horses. It helps their profile.”
That’s fair. All those beheaded in Game of Thrones had much to thank that series for.
“I was very firm with myself about not allowing that kind of thing to influence the plot,” he says. “It does allow me to toy with readers a lot. The characters that are put in danger. And readers are aware by now that I am capable of killing off whoever is in danger.”
[ New crime fiction: cynical pitch-black comedy reinvigorates the spy fiction genreOpens in new window ]
But maybe not Jackson Lamb himself. The monstrous genius is the fetid centre of the Slow Horses universe. In the new book, River Cartwright (played by Jack Lowden on the telly) remembers thinking of his boss as a “coiled sponge”. That combination of tension and flaccidity is perfect. “At any moment, without warning, he might not do anything,” Cartwright continues.
Everyone in Slough House has mucked up on the job, but each has a gift worth savouring. Lamb himself is a classic anti-hero of hard-boiled fiction: the slob who is always the cleverest man in the room. Ian Fleming admitted that, after Sean Connery was cast as James Bond, he found himself incorporating the Scotsman’s traits into later books. John le Carré was similarly influenced by Alec Guinness’s portrayal of his own spymaster, George Smiley. Has Herron had a similar experience with Oldman?
“I think he’s doing such a fantastic job, as are all the rest of the cast,” he says, loyally. “But the fact is I don’t write with pictures in my head. I’m not transcribing. I’m working on the page, and I’m working with vocabulary. I’ve never had a very strong visual sense of what these characters are like. I’ve occasionally had to provide descriptions of them, because that’s what you do when you’re writing a novel.”
Raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the son of an optician father and a teacher mum, Herron was a voracious reader from a young age. In the early 1980s he made his way to Balliol College, Oxford, and has lived in that city ever since. Balliol has an interesting reputation. It is seen as one of the brainiest colleges – alma mater of Christoper Hitchens, Graham Greene and Harold Macmillan – but also one more open to people from less privileged backgrounds. Did he find Oxford then still full of poshos?
“Oxford certainly was,” he says. “Balliol liked to think it wasn’t. But I went to a state school, and I was very much in the minority there. And younger as well, because most people did come from far more comfortable backgrounds than me. Many of them had had a year off and had travelled and so on. They were generally far more confident. I don’t want to say ‘entitled’, but that’s pretty much what I mean.”
For all that, Herron enjoyed his time at Oxford. He explains that writing was always an ambition – he initially leant towards poetry – but was realistic enough not to expect he’d make a career by the pen. He eventually found work as a subeditor on a legal magazine and stayed in that line for decades. I can imagine him as the sort of fellow to insist on the difference between “enormity” and “enormousness”.
“It was certainly never a job that I grated against,” he says. “I wasn’t gnashing my teeth thinking I should be at home writing novels. I was enjoying the job. I enjoyed the work. You recognise that very specific skill that you have taking two pages of text and turning them into one and a half pages without losing any of the meaning.”
Does this mean his novels arrive clean and perfect to the editor, no further tinkering required?
“That’s certainly how I feel. Ha ha.”
He began with a fine series of crime novels, set in Oxford, featuring the investigator Zoë Boehm. Following the success of Slow Horses, those books have inevitably made it on to TV. Down Cemetery Road, starring Emma Thompson as Boehm, reaches Apple TV+ in October.
“It’s nice to have them coming back to life,” Herron says. “They’ve not been out of print, but they’ve been less obvious, shall we say, in bookshops. And I think that might change a little bit once people see Emma Thompson.”
Given that Slow Horses fans will be paused at different points in their viewing and watching, it would be wise not to say too much about the plots of either the coming series or the new book. But it is worth exploring familiar themes. Unlike Len Deighton or le Carré, his most obvious predecessors, Herron enjoys commenting with differing degrees of explicitness on specific events of the day. There is a fictional version of Boris Johnson, the former British prime minister (a near-exact contemporary at Balliol), in the sequence. Clown Town introduces us to an unnamed new prime minister who sounds very like Keir Starmer. A familiar figure from the books notes that the new premiere’s chief electoral advantage was not being any of his five predecessors.
“It was certainly the view I wanted to express,” Herron says. “The narrative voice I adopt is not necessarily my own. But I think it’s clear to anybody that was sentient at the time of the last election that not being Rishi Sunak was Keir Starmer’s huge advantage – not being Liz Truss and not being Boris Johnson. And, for that reason, he had done very little other than not to be those people for some years. But it turns out you need to do a bit more than that to run a country.”
Truss’s name appears twice in unflattering asides. I take it that is all we will see of her.
“I don’t write many short stories,” Herron says, smiling. “Liz Truss isn’t about to appear as a central character. She is a footnote. She doesn’t even deserve to be a footnote, frankly. If I made two asides about her, I can’t actually remember what they were. That’s more than she deserves.”
Based on London Rules, from 2018, the new series of Slow Horses has much to do with a Eurosceptic MP married to a tabloid journalist – draw your own parallels – and the growth of racially charged politics in post-Brexit London. I wonder to what extent Herron sees the books as vehicles to express his views on the state of contemporary Britain.
“I suppose they are to some extent,” he says. “That’s just me pleasing myself, really. I wouldn’t want anyone else to take that too seriously. It’s simply the way that the voice has developed. When I was writing London Rules – which I started planning before the Brexit referendum but started writing afterwards – I wanted to make a comment on all that. And I’ve been doing something similar ever since.”
One never knows in life. But it feels as if Slow Horses could run as long as Herron wants it to run. The core story is solid. British affairs will continue to provide endless subjects for comment. Let the late fame continue.
“If you’re going to be successful in just one half of your career, be successful in the second half,” he says. “First half is a tragedy. The second half is a happy ending.”
Clown Town is published by John Murray. Slow Horses season five streams on Apple TV+ from Wednesday, September 24th
