SECRETS, SPIES & SLOW-BURN SUCCESS
His TV series Slow Horses may be a hit, but spy novelist MICK HERRON knows as much about failure as his fictional characters, he tells Sam Baker
Mick Herron is sitting in the light-filled kitchen of the Oxford house he shares with his partner Jo Howard. The spy novelist has to Zoom from here because his flat – where he commutes to each day to write, and where he lived until lockdown – is a technological deadzone of which MI5 would be proud: no broadband, no email, no smartphone. It probably doesn’t even appear on Google Maps. Herron doesn’t drive or have social media either. ‘I do have a phone!’ he protests. ‘One of those flippy ones?’ I ask. ‘Oh no,’ he replies. ‘Nothing that posh!’
A boyish 60, Herron is relaxed for an introvert who’d rather be in a room on his own with his characters. He’s been on tour for the past few months talking about his latest book, The Secret Hours. Yesterday, he spent six hours in a screening room watching season three of Slow Horses, the five-time Bafta-nominated Apple+ TV series that has taken his already successful ‘Slough House’ series and sent it stratospheric. (The eight Slough House books, set in a place where
MI5 puts ‘failed’ spies, have sold more than two million copies and are published in 20 languages.)
‘I can’t say much about it, but it’s action packed,’ says Herron. ‘They’ve made some changes to the plot but it’s recognisably the same tale and follows the same direction. It starts slowly and then goes off like a rocket.’
Herron’s enthusiasm isn’t surprising given the cast: Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb – a heavy-drinking, sweary, hygiene-challenged former spy who, for reasons we don’t yet know, heads up Slough House – and Kristin Scott Thomas as the chilly MI5 boss ‘Lady Di’ Taverner. ‘I remember getting a phone call about Gary signing up for Jackson Lamb while I was out and I had to stop and lean against a wall,’ says Herron.
The soundtrack is starry, too. Mick
Jagger – a long-time fan of the novels – wrote and performed it. ‘His name hadn’t even been mentioned in my hearing!’ says Herron. ‘We’d talked about a “sleazy London voice”, which I guess kind of narrows it down to Mick Jagger, then it turned out he’d read the books and got on board immediately. That was a moment where I thought, “Blimey, this is extraordinary.”’
Jagger certainly nails that sleazy London voice. Lines from the theme song, ‘Strange Game’, include, ‘Surrounded by losers, misfits and boozers. Hanging by your fingernails…
You made one mistake. You got burned at the stake.’
Contrary to rumours, Herron has no personal experience of the espionage world. Instead he spent the bulk of his working life commuting to London; sub-editing on a legal magazine by day, writing crime fiction by night. He knows you don’t believe that. He’s used to it. ‘There’s a tradition in spy novels that writers have experience of the world of which they’re writing, in a way that people writing cosy crime novels don’t. Nobody expects a cosy crime author to have been baking cakes and solving murders!
‘I’m happy for people to think I was a spy. Someone came up to a friend of mine at Harrogate [crime festival] and said she knew that I used to work for GCHQ! When I was in Cheltenham for an event recently I asked the audience if anyone knew anything about it because I certainly don’t.’
Herron grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne, the fourth of six siblings. His dad was an optician, his mum a nurseryschool teacher. Little Mick had an ‘addiction to stories’. In the school holidays he would go to the library and get through ‘two or three books a day’. After state school, he went to Oxford to study English Literature and has never left the city, although he’s still close to his family.
‘We go on holiday together every year with all our partners and offspring – there are 20-plus of us and the age range is five to 90.’
Herron published his first novel, a detective story called Down Cemetery Road, in 2003. He then wrote three more, before deciding he wanted to change style: add more characters, write on a bigger scale. Then the 7/7 bombings happened in 2005, and his reality shifted. ‘It was a work day,’ he recalls. ‘I’d arrived in London and was waiting at Paddington Station for a tube. I was standing on the Circle Line platform when I heard what must have been the first of the bombs going off [at nearby Edgware Road]. Then there was an announcement, “sorry, no tubes running”. I ended up getting a variety of buses and, because I don’t have a smartphone, it was only after I arrived at work 90 minutes later that I found out what had happened.
‘What I’d always thought of as being at a remove from my everyday experience – bombs going off – was suddenly not removed at all, and it opened a door: this is an experience I’ve had, walking through a city that’s being bombed, and I have a right to write about it. So Slow Horses was a way of writing about that experience.’
The book was published in 2010, sales were lacklustre and his British publisher didn’t do anything with its sequel. But thanks to Herron’s US publisher, a few copies were still distributed in Europe. In 2013, Mark Richards, an editor at John Murray Press, came across a US paperback of Slow Horses in Liverpool Street Station. Richards was known by colleagues as the ‘furniture restorer’, because he could look at something neglected and spot its quality. Herron became his next project. ‘Luckily for me, he bought it, read it on the train home and made a deal with the US publisher to lease
UK publication rights. It all happened quickly after that,’ says Herron.
Last year, The New Yorker published an interview with Herron, headlined ‘Is Mick Herron The Best Spy Novelist Of His Generation?’; The Daily Telegraph called Slow Horses one of the greatest spy novels ever written and critics often refer to Herron as John Le Carré’s heir. How does the latter feel?
‘I take it with a pinch of salt,’ he says, typically self-effacing. ‘If you write a spy novel you’re going to be compared to him, that’s just the baseline. I’m not sure he’d have been an admirer of the books I write, although I was a huge admirer of the books he wrote.’
On the other hand, when I tell him that Mick Jagger described his books as the anti-Le Carré, he practically fizzes. ‘Really? I didn’t know that,’ he beams. ‘Excellent.’
Now, Herron is beginning the ninth Slough House novel – it’s his first time with the characters since the TV series took off. Will Lamb and Taverner be taken over by Oldman and Scott Thomas? ‘I don’t think it would harm it at all if I start seeing Gary or Kristin when I write. And the same for the rest of the cast. They embody them so fully.’
Will it be hard to set the glamour of screenings aside and get back to work? ‘It’s the writing that matters,’ he says. ‘I’m wary of being flavour of the month. Especially since that month is probably just about up! Of course there’s glamour involved. When you find yourself in the same room as acclaimed stars, you get a ringside view of what that sort of life is like. But it’s not real. I’m not sure it’s even real to them. They all go home afterwards and are relieved to put their feet up and have a cup of tea. And that’s my idea of a good night out. The earlier you get your pyjamas on the better the evening is.’
‘I WAS AT THE STATION WHEN I HEARD THE FIRST BOMB GO OFF’
Season three of Slow Horses is on Apple TV+. Herron’s latest novel, The Secret Hours, is published by John Murray in paperback, €17.99