The Slow Horses author on the ‘virtue of limitations’ and drawing life lessons from The Wind in the Willows
Mick Herron, 58, is the author of 19 books, most recently Bad Actors, the eighth novel in his Jackson Lamb series about a group of demoted MI5 agents. In 2013, he won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for the second instalment, Dead Lions, which Herron’s original publisher rejected on account of the poor sales of the first book, Slow Horses, now an Apple TV+ drama starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. He is on the shortlist (for a fifth time) of the Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year award (announced 23 July), for Slough House, the seventh in the series, out in paperback. Herron met me in Oxford, where he has lived ever since leaving Newcastle to study English in 1981.
What led you to write an espionage series?
I’d read a fair amount of spy fiction but hadn’t written any, largely because I felt there was no point, not having the knowledge of actually having worked in that area. When I decided I could write about people who were [themselves] barred from a greater knowledge [of espionage], I realised it was a way into the genre. The whole premise of the series is that they’re not allowed to do anything; I’m basically writing about people being in an office. It was making a virtue of limitations, really. A surprising number of readers say: “Oh, I used to work in that world and it’s quite realistic”, which I suspect isn’t entirely the truth, but probably everybody working in any kind of organisation has that experience of middle management and things going wrong.
The massive success of the series, after your original publisher dropped it, must feel pretty vindicating.
I suppose I have my moments. I know I’ve been extremely lucky, but one of the ways I’ve been lucky, counterintuitively, is that it was an awful long time before I gained any kind of readership. If it had been immediate, I probably wouldn’t be on an even keel now. I was already established in what I was doing; success has given me freedom to write full time, but the problems and joys of sitting down to get on with the work remain the same. If success had been the prime objective, I’d probably have given up when Slow Horses didn’t do anything. I mean, it wasn’t a success then [in 2010]. It is now. But it’s the same book. So I tend not to pay too much attention.
For a novel written in 2008, when Labour were still in power, it was startlingly prescient, from Brexit to the rise of Boris Johnson.
I was conjuring worst-case scenarios and made some lucky stabs in the dark. I’ve been drawn to politics as a backdrop because it seems to go hand in hand with the kind of espionage thriller I’m interested in. I don’t want to write a big, plotted, evil-mastermind spy novel; I’m interested in incompetence, things going wrong, badly motivated stuff, and that’s essentially our political reality now. It gives me plenty of scope, but I don’t feel good about it. We have a prime minister who acts with the worst possible intentions because he’s only interested in himself. As a citizen, I deplore it; as a writer, I’m rubbing my hands.
