How Mick Herron fell in love with Jackson Lamb and the Slow Horses

Mick Herron didn’t know what he was embarking on when he wrote Slow Horses. He had been immersed in a four-book series about an Oxford private detective, Zoë Boehm, but had reached a point when he wanted to write another standalone novel (his first had been Reconstruction) that allowed him a greater focus on politics and the appeal of an ensemble cast.

“The notion of writing about a group of people who were labelled failures, who had been frustrated in their careers, was interesting. And I wanted to write about government and power and that manner of things as the backdrop and in some cases the trigger for various plots.”

What he didn’t intend was to write another series, he says from his home in Oxford.

Slow Horses introduced us to the agents of Slough House, a dismal MI5 branch office (the title is how other, more successful agents refer to its denizens), who have been banished from the Regent’s Park HQ for jeopardising operations, drinking too much, compromising secrecy, or generally making a catastrophic mess of their lives and the lives of others.

They are under the dubious command of Jackson Lamb – fat, foul-mouthed, filthy, and flatulent – who runs the place, mostly, as a sort of malign dictatorship. He’s no James Bond or George Smiley: imagine Ian Fleming or John le Carré describing him in his office “bowed over his desk like a Francis Bacon study in onanism”.

The slow horses are corralled in a three-storey terrace that creaks and groans and, as in a Dickens novel, is almost as much a character as River Cartwright, Catherine Standish, Louisa Guy, Roddy Ho and the other walking disasters who ply their espionage trade from its shabby offices. Much to their dismay, it’s only Lamb who, despite his ample girth, considerable alcohol intake and penchant for a smoke, can get up its creaking stairs without a sound.

Like millions of his readers, Herron found himself entranced by the world he had created: “I had originally planned to write a Zoë novel after that. But then I got to the end and thought, No, I want to stay in this world. I’m enjoying myself.”

He may have loved Slow Horses, which he began in 2008, but his then-British publisher didn’t – and promptly turned it down (along with its follow-up, Dead Lions). Fortunately, his US publisher, Soho Press, did not follow suit.

Herron didn’t feel particularly disconsolate about his prospects at the time and “after Reconstruction failed to be a global bestseller of extraordinary proportions, I realised I wasn’t going to be that kind of writer. It’s handy to get that learned.”

But shortly after Slow Horses was optioned for the small screen, his third Slough House book, Real Tigers, was snapped up for publication by John Murray. And gradually he did become that global bestseller.

This month sees publication of the ninth in the unintended series, Clown Town. Its plot revolves around the consequences of Pitchfork, an operation in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. It’s inspired by Stakeknife, the real-life operation run by MI5 that allowed a British agent in the IRA to commit brutal murders to protect his identity. According to Herron, Stakeknife “demonstrated a wrongful use of power, one of the worst examples available”.

Clown Town also revisits dodgy dealings between the boss at the Regents Park HQ, Diana Taverner, and Herron’s ongoing political whipping boy – recognisably inspired by former British PM Boris Johnson – Peter Judd; the mystery of a missing book from River Cartwright’s late grandfather’s library, and the difficulties of the new British Prime Minister (come in Keir Starmer), whose “government had hit the ground runny, like a jelly that hadn’t quite set”. It is Herron in top form – witty, intriguing, piercing, surprising and hugely entertaining.

His readers know that Herron is not averse to killing off characters. He does so because he wants to maintain the idea that jeopardy is real in his chosen genre. “With a readership who follows you through a series, they know that whenever I put a character in danger now, that danger might not go away as it inevitably does in novels with a single viewpoint.”

His books show an exasperation and lament at the moral turpitude of his country’s politicians, but he doesn’t write with the overt anger, say, of le Carré, whose work he greatly admires. Certainly, he’s funnier, but he reckons he’s pettier. And he claims Smiley’s creator would not approve of his approach.

“As a citizen, I was angry at being ruled by a minority elite of public school boys for the best part of a decade who were mostly interested in feathering their own nests and giving each other contracts for huge amounts of money during COVID, for instance. All those things are huge sources of anger and seem to have just gone away. There should be more investigation,” he says. But the books, he maintains, are character pieces within the thriller framework, and politics only part of the mix.

The creation of Jackson Lamb was something of a natural progression. His spies may have failed somehow, but the nature of their work meant they couldn’t be sacked – they had to resign – “so giving them an unpleasant boss was an obvious next stage in that process. Somebody was going to be there to make them miserable, but of course, a situation could arise where he was going to have to come to their defence.” As he does in most of the books.

Although the reader has learned more about Lamb over the series, Herron likes to keep him enigmatic, and for that reason, the reader is now never privy to his thoughts. Nevertheless, in his previous book, The Secret Hours, a loosely related standalone, there was more about Lamb’s early experiences in Berlin, although then he went by a different name.

“I wanted to write a book in which I could explore some of the backstories without mentioning any of the characters by name. It would have amused me if nobody noticed.”

The TV series based on the Slow Horses books goes into its fifth round later this month, with Jackson Lamb brilliantly portrayed by Gary Oldman (who, incidentally, has also played Smiley on screen). When le Carré came to write Smiley after the BBC adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy he always had Alec Guinness in his mind’s eye. Herron doesn’t have that problem.

“I think when I’m writing, when I’m at the typeface as it were, I don’t have pictures in my head. I have the screen in front of me and I have words on the page and that’s what I’m dealing with. When I’m reading over what I’ve done, it doesn’t trouble me if I start imagining Gary saying the words to Saskia (Reeves, as Catherine Standish) or Kristin Scott Thomas (as Taverner).”

Herron loves to nod to other writers in the books, diss real-life politicians by name – come in Liz Truss and Nigel Farage – and have Roddy Ho croon “losers and boozers” in a wink to Mick Jagger’s theme song for the TV series. “One of the joys of writing novels and reading them is taking part in a dialogue, so to reach out and touch other books at the same time is part of the fun.”

He says he’s been fortunate with the adaptations of his books and is enthusiastic about Down Cemetery Road, the screen version of the Zoë Boehm books with Emma Thompson in the title role, which will screen at the end of next month.

He wrote the book in the late ’90s, and while he hasn’t adapted it, he has been involved with the writers as plenty of changes had to be made so it works for today: “I’m around quite a bit when those things are being discussed and decided and then I absent myself and other people do the actual work. That’s how I like it.”

Herron handed Clown Town in last November and as usual felt bereft on finishing a book. So by January he had embarked on a standalone spy novel. “I don’t feel whole when I’m not writing, even when writing is a pain and a chore. It’s something that I feel it’s necessary to do.”

With Clown Town out, cricket-loving Herron has the Ashes to look forward to, although he’s not confident of England’s prospects. Not that he’ll be out in Australia to watch the Tests: he’s strictly a cricket-on-the-radio man. But a book tour next year is being discussed.

Clown Town (Baskerville) is out on September 13. Slow Horses 5 streams on Apple TV+ from September 24. Down Cemetery Road streams on Apple TV+ from October 29.

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