The spymaster who lives life deep in the shadows
Mick Herron sells books galore but stays off the radar... which helped him write his latest in just six weeks, says Jon Coates
AWARD-WINNING author Mick Herron says he finds it “strange” when people recognise him in public. Despite being critically acclaimed as “Britain’s modern spymaster” and “the heir apparent to John Le Carré and Len Deighton”, he has always shunned the limelight.
“I get recognised very occasionally, which feels a bit weird,” he says. “Because I always think there is a disconnect between me the author and me who does the public stuff. I don’t mind it but it feels strange.”
Herron, 56, has built up a devoted following for his series about Slough House, a run-down London building where MI5 agents are sent after career-ending mistakes. It’s supposed to keep them out of trouble but, of course, doesn’t.
Jackson Lamb, a politically-incorrect, morbidly obese and flatulent spymaster rules over the cast of misfits, taking great pleasure in making fun at their expense.
Herron is the polar opposite of his gloriously grotesque creation. when we meet at the rooftop restaurant of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the city where he has lived since studying English at Balliol College in the early 1980s, he is polite and self-effacing, studiously thinking about every question before answering.
He says of Lamb: “It could well be that I am getting rid of all my malice on the page, but it is not just about being nasty to people, it is about being nasty to people in a linguistically creative way and that is what gives me pleasure.”
The Slough House series has sold more than a million books, but Lamb and his failed spies are about to get a much wider audience with production company See Saw Films announcing the first two of the books, Slow Horses and Dead Lions, are being adapted to be streamed on the newly launched Apple TV.
Gary Oldman, who won a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of winston
Churchill in 2017 film Darkest Hour, will star as Lamb, with the thick of It writer Will Smith and comedy actor and writer Morwenna Banks adapting the screenplay.
Herron is decidedly animated when talking about Oldman taking on the role. The actor, who also portrayed John Le Carré’s George Smiley in a film adaptation of his novel tinker, tailor, Soldier, Spy, has only made a few guest appearances on TV, including US sitcom Friends.
“I could not be more thrilled with the casting of Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, it’s absolutely fantastic,” says Herron.
“There are other pieces of casting which I’m not allowed to talk about because they haven’t been confirmed yet, but if they go ahead, which looks reasonably likely, then it is going to be extraordinary.”
Filming on both is set to start in April for 2021 release. “If it goes well then they will start work on Real tigers next year,” he says.
That’s the third book – but
Herron plans to start writing book eight this spring; the seventh will be published early next year.
He remains tight-lipped about that one, only revealing
“more than any other book I have written, even more than The Catch, the plot is triggered by real-life events”.
The Catch is his new novella featuring John Batchelor, a character who appeared in short booksthe List andthe Drop.
It is the first book touching on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to be published since
Prince Andrew’s ill-judged Newsnight interview. Herron was halfway through his novel when paedophile financier Epstein was found hanged in his US prison cell last August before trial for sex trafficking.
He says: “I remember hearing that on a news broadcast and thinking there are going to be a lot of conspiracy theories... but I think he killed himself.”
He put his novel aside and wrote The
Catch in under six weeks, sending it to his publisher without warning. Four months later it’s on sale, a remarkably swift turnaround.
It was published onthursday to coincide with the Drop being serialised in BBC Radio 4’s Bedtime slot last week, read by British actor John Heffernan, who portrayed Jonathan Harker in BBC One’s adaptation of Dracula.
An omnibus edition of all five parts will air on BBC Radio 4 Extra at 2.30pm today.
Unmarried Herron has been a published author since 2003 but only achieved commercial success in 2015. He wrote The Catch before Prince Andrew’s now infamous tv interview, but says otherwise he might have incorporated it in the book.
He says: “I am not rabidly anti-royal but I am anti-abuse of power, abuse of privilege and the abuse of vulnerable young women, and this story kind of coalesces around those three things.
“I didn’t actually see Andrew’s TV interview live, it was repeated on radio and news programmes, and some of the things he said were just jaw-dropping.”
Herron, born in Newcastle, has lived in Oxford since graduating through “inertia”, working as a sub-editor on a legal journal for “15 years and one month”. He would leave home at dawn and spent four to five hours a day commuting to and from the office in London’s Old Street, a thought which now horrifies him. He only quit to become a full-time writer in January 2017.
HERRON doesn’t own a TV or a smart phone, or have wi-fi on his laptop. “It makes me sound like a bit of a puritan, which I’m not at all,” he says. “I’m just lazy about learning new technology and set in my habits.
“When I was working I didn’t write while travelling so I only had a very limited amount of time each evening to write, so I didn’t do social media or anything like that as it would have taken up my writing time, and I’ve never felt the urge to alter that.”
The fictional Slough House was inspired by a neglected building in Aldersgate Street that Herron passed every morning and evening walking from his office to Barbican tube station.
The first book was more about office politics than the Secret Service but subsequent books have focused on the chaos of Brexit Britain.
“The recent political turmoil has given me the perfect backdrop,” he says. “As a citizen I am appalled but as a writer it is exactly what I need.”
So he has no plans to stop writing the Slough House series, adding: “I’m having the time of my life.”
● The Catch (John Murray, £9.99)