Mick Herron, recently saluted in the New Yorker as “the best spy novelist of his generation”, has earned this tag: he is a master of espionage fiction, the closest we have to a successor to John le Carré and a treat to read. His bestselling Slough House books – about failed secret agents ousted from MI5’s headquarters in Regent’s Park, doomed to a seedy building in London’s Barbican – delight his fans because they are gripping and laugh-aloud funny as well as psychologically and politically astute. The superb Apple TV+ series, Slow Horses – two unmissable seasons and a third to come later this year – with Kristin Scott Thomas as second desk at MI5, Jack Lowden as disgraced secret agent River Cartwright and Gary Oldman as Slough House boss Jackson Lamb (a chain-smoker in a flasher’s mac, with greasy hair, a crackling laugh and lots of backchat), has spurred Herron’s career into a headlong gallop. And now he is about to publish a standalone novel, his first in years, The Secret Hours, about a disastrous MI5 mission in cold war Berlin. He has, on the page, a Raymond Chandleresque fluency – he gets language on the run – mixed with deadpan British wit. But what is striking about him in person, as I am about to discover, is his reluctance to take on the role of celebrated author: it comes naturally to him to be on the back foot.
It is a drizzly August day as I arrive at a modest terrace house in Oxford’s Summertown. The door is opened by Herron’s partner, Jo Howard – it is her house. He moved in during the pandemic when Boris Johnson announced lockdown. She works as a headhunter for the publishing industry and is immediately likable and makes us feel at home. Herron emerges from the sitting room and then disappears again to help make tea. As soon as he resurfaces, I need to ask him about one of the subjects dearest to his heart: their cats. I enquire about Tommy (the other cat is Scout) whom, I already know, through emails from his PR, has been in the wars (the whereabouts of our meeting was dictated by the cat’s broken leg and whether Herron needed to be on duty). The cat-centric conversation now moves through pet insurance to the way animal care trumps what is on offer for people, and when I mention that I lost my cat recently, he offers his condolences with such genuine – if slightly formal – sympathy that I am moved: he is, it could not be clearer, a lovely man.
