SO REAL IT’S SPOOKY

Mick Herron is the new king of the spy thriller... can he truly be making it all up?

The thought occurs that Mick Herron would make an excellent spy. The acclaimed thriller writer, 49, has all the obvious attributes: an Oxbridge grad, quietly spoken, with a careful manner and a nose for espionage.

‘I’ve met people who have been involved in that world, but I’ve never used them as sources,’ he says, cautiously. If Herron’s literary career is mere cover, it’s proving a highly successful one. Feted by Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, compared to Graham Greene and John Le Carré, and winner of a coveted Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, Herron’s series of novels about a group of deadbeat spies – or ‘slow horses’, in spook parlance – has been hailed as the most exciting thing to hit the genre since George Smiley hung up his mackintosh.

While Le Carré and Greene had a foothold in the world of espionage, Herron insists he has no insider info, preferring the age-old trick of making it all up. ‘Research is a chore, a distraction,’ he says. ‘I’ll read a headline and if it intrigues me, rather than reading the story, I’ll write my own.’

Born in Newcastle, he studied English at Oxford – where he still lives – and published his first novel, Down Cemetery Road, in 2003. He worked in London as a sub-editor for employment law publications (at least, that’s his story), writing 350 words each night once he got home. He packed in the day job only at the beginning of this month. ‘Sitting home all day making stuff up, I’m ready to do that now,’ he says.

Herron’s latest novel, Spook Street, is his tenth, and the fourth in the series about a dysfunctional team of demotivated spooks led by the wonderfully dissolute Jackson Lamb. Herron describes him as ‘profane, slovenly, drunken, work-shy, almost sociopathic, but clever and not entirely irredeemable’. He adds: ‘I write about people like me – although I’m not quite as bitter as the books might make you think!’

A pilot for a TV adaptation of the Lamb novels is in the pipeline, written by Will Smith, whose credits include The Thick Of It and Veep. ‘I was extremely happy with the script,’ says Herron, before the topic swiftly becomes ‘classified’.

Perhaps he is a spook after all.