It’s hard to picture anyone less like the disheveled, washed-up MI5 agent Jackson Lamb than his creator, Mick Herron. “He must come from deep in my subconscious,” jokes the 62-year-old thriller writer, sipping mineral water at a rooftop bar in his hometown of Oxford—a world away from London’s Aldersgate, where his bestselling Slough House series is set. Dressed in a “blue shirt, white tee” (a nod fans will recognize), he speaks softly with a hint of a Geordie accent. Herron is often called the heir to John le Carré and “the best spy novelist of his generation” by the New Yorker. Unlike le Carré, however, he has never been a spy. Strangely, Wikipedia even gave him a completely made-up birthday. “I got cards. I got a cake,” he says.
For those unfamiliar, the novels and award-winning TV series follow a group of misfit spies banished to Slough House by MI5 after various blunders and misdeeds. The rundown office is so far from the sleek Regent’s Park headquarters it might as well be in the town of Slough. The twist is that these unlucky underdogs—nicknamed “slow horses”—under the grimy leadership of Jackson Lamb, always manage to outsmart the polished agents and “the Dogs” back at the Park.
“In its simplest terms, it doesn’t sound all that promising, does it?” Herron says modestly. “A bunch of people who aren’t good at their jobs and don’t like each other, stuck working together in an office. Why would anyone want to read that?” For starters, it’s great fun. In a genre crowded with dark psychological thrillers and slick spin-offs, Herron’s blend of high stakes, low comedy, and political satire feels like a breath of fresh air—if the air at Slough House weren’t thick with flatulence and frustration. Will Smith, co-writer of The Thick of It and Veep, was the perfect choice to adapt Herron’s world for TV: Lamb is MI5’s answer to Malcolm Tucker, only filthier. A Cold War relic held together by alcohol, cigarettes, and loyalty to his “joes,” Lamb has become one of contemporary fiction’s great characters. Like a modern-day Falstaff or Fagin, he’s now part of the public imagination, thanks to Gary Oldman’s affectionate portrayal and Kristin Scott Thomas’s regally icy turn as MI5 chief Diana Taverner in the TV series.
This autumn, Oldman and the cast return for season five, based on the fifth Slough House novel, London Rules. Riding on this success, Apple TV+ will also adapt Herron’s lesser-known 2003 debut, Down Cemetery Road, with Emma Thompson as Oxford private detective Zoë Boehm. And this week, the author releases the ninth book in the Slough House series, Clown Town.
The new novel draws inspiration from the true story of an IRA informant and murderer codenamed Stakeknife, real name Freddie Scappaticci. Herron calls him “an appalling human being,” who was protected by British intelligence in the 70s and 80s—an operation one senior civil servant described as “one of the most morally dubious” the services had ever been involved in. Perfect material for Herron. Characters in the Slough House novels often navigate the murky boundary between protecting the nation and serving the interests of GCHQ. Stakeknife died “peacefully in his bed” in 2023, after Herron was already deep into writing Clown Town. The author didn’t stick too closely to the historical facts. “It hampers the imagination,” he says. “Also, I’m quite lazy when it comes to research.”
“You don’t need to understand politics to be a victim of political terror, to have bombs go off around you,” Herron notes. Clown Town begins with a leftwing government finding its footing, led by a prime minister who favors designer glasses and “happens to be a lawyer.” While there may be a new broom at No. 10, the shadowy corners of the British establishment remain as grimy as ever. “I’m writing about how power corrupts,” Herron says. “It’s hardly an original observation, but it doesn’t matter.”It doesn’t matter who’s in power—things will go wrong, whether by mistake or on purpose. I lean more toward the “mistake” view of history than the conspiracy one, but the outcome is the same.
Herron may not have worked in intelligence, but he knows office life. “In many ways, I’m writing more about offices than spies,” he says. “The intelligence service is basically a big office. They have kitchens with fridges. The same things happen there as in any other workplace.” This is no James Bond.
Getting Herron to admit his books are a huge success is like trying to convince Lamb to take a shower. “Failure always interests me more than success,” he insists. “It would be silly to say I’m not successful now, but I was this close to failing,” he adds, pinching his thumb and forefinger together. “It could have gone very differently. I was very lucky.”
His story is one of publishing’s great recent successes—an inspiration to underdogs everywhere. For years, on his walk to the legal journal where he worked as a subeditor, he passed a grim building on Aldersgate Street. “I had no idea I’d write a book, let alone a series, about it,” he says of what became Slough House. “I’ve been ‘living’ there ever since.” That same building appears in the TV adaptation. “They went the extra mile. They could have used any building, but they didn’t.” On his evening train back to Oxford, he would refine his ideas so that by the time he got home, he knew exactly what to write. “I had about an hour of work in me each night,” he says, averaging 360 words a day.
After trying poetry and literary fiction, he switched to crime with his Zoë Boehm series. On July 7, 2005, he was waiting on the platform at Paddington when a bomb exploded at Edgware Road, one stop away. “You don’t need to understand politics to be a victim of political terror, to have bombs go off around you,” he reflects. “That made me realize I could write about such events without fully grasping how they came about.” So he shifted focus and began writing spy novels.
Slow Horses was published in 2010, but a few years later, he couldn’t find a UK publisher for its sequel, Dead Lions. “What even is this?” one publisher asked, unsure if it was a thriller or a comedy. “The books didn’t sell at first,” Herron says calmly. “It didn’t surprise me. I wasn’t upset—I just got on with my life.”
An editor at John Murray happened to pick up Slow Horses at Liverpool Street station and decided to support it. The first two novels were republished in 2015. The next year, Herron took a four-month sabbatical to try writing full time. By 11 a.m. on the first day, he knew he could do it, and when he returned to the office, he handed in his notice.
But it was in 2016 that things really took off. “It was Brexit,” the author states plainly. “The country’s misfortune was my good luck.” His post-referendum novel, London Rules, came out in 2018. Suddenly, his populist, floppy-haired, bicycle-riding MP, Peter Judd, felt all too familiar. The parallels between PJ and BJ were hard to ignore. Herron attended Balliol College, Oxford, at the same time as Boris Johnson, though he wasn’t part of the Bullingdon Club. “PJ was just my kind of right-wing bogeyman,” he says now. “Public-school educated, with a sense of entitlement, self-obsession, and a complete disregard for ethics, morality, or integrity.” He glances toward the rooftops and their old college. “I mean, Boris Jo—””Johnson fits that,” he says, “but so do many other politicians.”
Just as le Carré’s novels captured the disillusionment and failure of the 1970s, Herron’s work reflects the anger and frustration felt by many across the country. By the time the TV adaptation launched in 2022, he had fully mastered his material. “I’m more popular now, but I don’t feel disconnected from the characters because of that,” he says. “When I sit down to write, I still feel like exactly the same person I’ve always been.”
Growing up in Newcastle upon Tyne as the fourth of six children in a Catholic family, Herron describes his childhood as happy. His father was an optician, and his mother, a nursery school teacher, taught him to read before he started school. He became an obsessive reader, often preferring fictional worlds to reality. “There was nothing wrong with the real world,” he says, “but I’d certainly rather have read a story than been at school.”
In 1979, he watched the TV adaptation of le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with his parents and was immediately hooked. The next day, he borrowed a copy from his local library. Later, as a student in Oxford, he watched the BBC’s 1982 adaptation of Smiley’s People on a small portable black-and-white TV. He finds it a fitting twist that Gary Oldman played Smiley in the 2011 film.
“Le Carré was exactly the right novelist for his time,” Herron remarks. “He witnessed the Berlin Wall going up. That was a gift to all of us. Brexit doesn’t compare,” he adds, dismissing any parallels with his own era.
Le Carré’s influence is evident throughout Slough House. The bookish former MI5 chief, David Cartwright, is surely a nod to David Cornwell, le Carré’s real name. Rereading Smiley’s People, Herron was delighted to discover a foul-mouthed taxi driver named J. Lamb, a detail that had lingered in his subconscious for years.
Lamb, Herron explains, was born from “an unfiltered love of language.” He is the only character whose mind the author never enters. Knowing whether Lamb truly means his outrageous statements would, in Herron’s view, “render the character useless.” “Either he’s an absolutely despicable human being or he’s just pretending,” he says. Some readers assumed Lamb was a mouthpiece for Herron’s own views and sent him supportive but vile letters.
Shifting between different characters’ perspectives—such as Lamb’s loyal secretary Catherine Standish and the tech geek Roddy Ho, two of his favorites—makes the reader work harder and goes against conventional creative writing rules. “And I love doing things that are against the rules,” Herron notes.
One such rule is killing off core characters, even likable ones like Min Harper. He wants readers to feel that “nobody’s safe,” though the motivation isn’t just for shock value. “It was about grief,” he explains. His father had died a few years before he began the series, but the decision was primarily literary. “I thought: I’ve got these…””People now. If I kill one of them, how are the others going to feel?”
I enjoy writing genre fiction. I appreciate the structure and knowing a book will have a proper ending, not just stop abruptly.
During lockdown, Herron moved in with his partner Jo Howard, a publishing headhunter, and now writes in his old flat. His commute is a 10-minute walk, and he aims to write between 500 and 600 words a day. Like Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen, he doesn’t own a smartphone and has no Wi-Fi. “We hang out and fax each other,” he jokes. More unusually, he reads throughout the day. “I can go straight from the laptop to the sofa,” he says. “I’m a reader before I’m a writer. Reading keeps my brain alert.”
He no longer worries about money as he once did, and he enjoys meeting other writers, which he finds great fun. But for the most part, he leads a quiet life with Howard and their two cats—if he were a spy, the cats would be his soft spots. Howard is his first reader, though he never discusses a book with her until it’s finished. She is a keen walker and can tell when he hits a tricky point in a novel by his pace. “I’m a plodder,” he says of his writing.
Currently, he is working on a novel outside the Slow Horses series. “It’s about spies,” he reveals. “I like writing genre stuff. I like having that structure. I like knowing a book will have an actual ending rather than just stop.”
He was surprised by how much he enjoyed being part of the writers’ room for the TV series. “I never felt particularly collaborative, even when I worked in an office.” He will miss showrunner Smith, who recently announced that season five would be his last.
Herron even made a couple of cameo appearances. You might have missed him and Howard in the first episode, coming out of Lamb’s favorite Chinese restaurant. In season four, they are seen leaving a hotel. He got to hail a taxi, he says, reenacting the gesture. They each had their own trailers. Could he ever have imagined such a scenario? “There was never a moment in my previous life where I thought this was possible,” he says.
Seasons five and six are complete (the latter based on two novels, Joe Country and Slough House). Filming for season seven, adapting Bad Actors, is set to begin this month, leaving only Clown Town left to adapt. Does he have an endgame in mind?
“There’s an awareness that there should be an endgame.” But he’s not putting his horses out to pasture just yet. He was tempted to blow up Slough House at the end of the first novel, closing with Lamb and Standish, the only survivors, escaping on a ferry. “That didn’t happen,” he says dryly. “It would have been a good ending, actually. But my life would be very different.”
Clown Town is published by Baskerville on Thursday. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Slow Horses season five premieres on Apple TV+ on September 24. On September 23, Mick Herron will join Richard Osman on stage at a special Guardian Live event to discuss their latest novels with Alex Clark. You can book tickets to attend the event live in London or via livestream.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of helpful and clear FAQs about Mick Herron and his writing philosophy
General Questions
Q Who is Mick Herron
A He is a British author best known for his espionage thriller series Slough House
Q What is the Slow Horses series about
A It follows a group of disgraced MI5 agents who are banished to Slough House a deadend department but who keep getting pulled into dangerous offthebooks operations
Q What did Mick Herron mean when he said I love breaking the rules
A He meant he enjoys subverting the typical conventions and expectations of the spy thriller genre to create something more surprising cynical and realistic
Questions About Breaking the Rules
Q What kind of rules does he break in his writing
A He breaks classic spy tropes like the flawless heroic agent His characters are deeply flawed bureaucratic and often make messy mistakes
Q Can you give an example of how he breaks the rules
A Sure Instead of a suave spy like James Bond his protagonist Jackson Lamb is rude slovenly and unheroic yet brilliant The good guys in MI5 headquarters are often more corrupt than the villains
Q Whats the benefit of breaking these genre rules
A It makes the stories feel fresh unpredictable and more relatable The messiness and office politics feel much more true to life than a typical polished spy adventure
Q Is this approach a common problem for new readers
A Some readers who expect a traditional actionheavy spy novel might be surprised by the focus on character flaws and dark humor But most find it a refreshing and addictive change
Q Does breaking the rules mean his books dont have plot
A Not at all The plots are incredibly intricate and clever Breaking character and tone rules allows the plots to have more shocking twists and unexpected outcomes
For Readers and Writers
Q Im new to Mick Herron Where should I start
