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.
We sit down on sofas looking out on to a garden dotted with bright geraniums in pots. I look from his intelligent, bespectacled face and responsive smile down to his bedroom slippers (Uniqlo, at a guess). He has a casual, out-to-pasture look and behaves as if he cannot shake the suspicion he might rival one of his own slow horses or “joes” [Le Carré’s coinage]. There has been speculation, of a fruitless sort, about whether Herron might have been a spy. After all, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John le Carré were spies: Greene for MI6, le Carré for MI5 and MI6, and Fleming worked in naval intelligence. On Radio 4’s Bookclub, James Naughtie recently raised this question and was gently sent packing. But would he have made a good spy? “I’d have made an awful spy. I’m lacking in practical abilities. These days, most spying is done from a technological perspective – which I’d be no good at. I don’t have a smartphone. I don’t have wifi.” Nor, it turns out, does he drive.
He would happily have you believe him a backward incompetent and, more than once, refers to his laziness. But his approach to tech has been anything but idle and began as a calculation. In his early days, he was a subeditor on a legal magazine, the Employment Law Brief. He was commuting from Oxford to London and trying his hand at detective fiction in the evenings: “I was very time-poor. I had only an hour of energy with which to write once home. If I’d been answering emails, that energy would have been dissipated.” Before the Jackson Lamb thrillers, he published a detective series with Oxford-based investigator Zoë Boehm, before switching to espionage.
Success did not come overnight. Slow Horses, the first in the Slough House series, dawdled. It is a compelling novel about a nationalist group, Sons of Albion, who kidnap a British Muslim standup comic, threatening to behead him within 48 hours. First published by Constable & Robinson in 2010, it sold poorly but Herron was not discouraged: “I’d concluded that I was never going to be a bestseller, but I’d had some books [published] and they were on my shelves – even if they weren’t on anybody else’s [laughs]. I wasn’t writing for money or acclaim, I was writing because that’s what I do. It fulfils me.” Then, one day, Mark Richards, an editor who had arrived at John Murray from Fourth Estate, picked up Slow Horses at Liverpool Street station by chance – and recognised Herron’s potential. But even republished under a new roof, Slow Horses remained a slow burner before, a couple of years later, taking off. What made the difference? “I’ve always thought a story has its own time. The book’s mood seemed to fit that of post-Brexit Britain, but it would also be criminal to overlook the marketing campaigns John Murray undertook.” And he quietly adds, “Obviously, I’m very happy with the way things have turned out.”
The Secret Hours is “a world away from Slough House”. Civil servants Malcolm Kyle and Griselda Flyte are working on the “monochrome inquiry” set up to investigate the British Secret Service. They are getting nowhere until the mysterious Otis file comes their way (in a brilliant scene involving a collision of supermarket trolleys and the sudden appearance, under a bag of oranges, of an envelope). Much of the novel’s action is set in Berlin. The wall has come down and classified secrets are about to spill. But what could this have to do with a dead badger and an ageing spy? Herron’s opening line is: “The worst smell in the world is dead badger” and he explains, “It’s something my brother David, who lives in north Devon, told me. Chapter one flowed from that and soon I had Max, a retired spook, roused by assailants in the middle of the night.” It was not long before he realised Max’s past could “intertwine with the world I’d already created”. So there are nods in the direction of the series: “I’m confident my regular readers will notice this, but just to be clear: Jackson Lamb’s name is never mentioned...”
In the new novel, as in its predecessors, Herron is fascinated by what spying does to the psyche. He offers us details of Max’s assumed life in Devon: the Volvo, candles in saucers, basket of firewood, and raises the possibility that a spy could, potentially, morph permanently into whoever it was he had been pretending to be.
What is it about identity-swapping that fascinates? Spying is “the essence of escapism,” Herron maintains. We consider the true story of the undercover policemen who pretended to be family men and admit to our base fascination with it: “The fascination is because it is about taking on a new identity to the nth degree. But it is utterly morally despicable. You see it from the point of view of the women betrayed. The notion that someone could control your life, based on a lie, is frightening. Good grief, how could that happen? Is there anybody I know who has lied to me…?” and he laughs.
Herron is more relaxed talking about public matters than about himself. He is adept at converting political indignation into entertainment – deriding Westminster’s bullying culture, its sex scandals and lockdown parties. He finds our political situation farcical and abhorrent. Would he agree that, in British politics, truth is stranger than fiction (banishing refugees to Rwanda)? He reacts with consternation: “I wouldn’t feel OK trying to treat that as a joke because it is so offensive. I feel an enormous sense of shame at our nation. Since 2016, our political reality has become increasingly absurd. I comment on the individuals involved because, in this age of populism, many of them are just in search of power and the various forms of gratification that come with power. They are absolutely fair game.”
Liz Truss, for whom he has particular contempt, he has yet to send up: “The most astonishing thing is there has never been any apology or awareness of what she did and how it is going to cause so much hardship for years to come.” But he does not neglect to mention the consequences of her time in office in the new novel. Malcolm Kyle protests: “I spend 60-odd % of my salary in rent. I turn the heating on for an hour in the evenings – two at weekends.”
My hunch is that when Herron stalls in conversation, it is because he would prefer to be able to consider his answers in the way writing allows. When I ask about his childhood, he comes up with “happy” – then pauses. He grew up in Jesmond, Newcastle, one of six children. His mother was a nursery school teacher. His father was an optician. He has been shortsighted since he was 10 (he was an omnivore reader – everything from Blyton to Wind in the Willows and a sophisticated version of King Arthur). His dad supplied his glasses and he was “disturbed” when, eventually, he had to buy his own; “so expensive,” he says, under his breath. When I ask why he stayed on in Oxford after studying English, his one-word answer is a joke: “inertia”. When he returns to Newcastle – his mother still lives there – he feels at home. He is 60 but does he share Max’s take on age: “God, he was going to be good at being old, if circumstances allowed”? He cannot tell, he says. I dangle another line: “We are all diminished by our wrong choices…” Does this apply to him? “I can think of some wrong choices, but I’d rather not… being here now is what gives me contentment… you wouldn’t want to go back to change anything because time travel doesn’t work.” Another of his sentences comes into my mind: “There are always parts of a story you never find out.”
He is chuffed when I tell him I loved the Apple series and its stirring sound track, Strange Game, by Mick Jagger (a Herron fan). “I’ve been absolutely thrilled by it. I’ve been fortunate that the producers and writers were determined to bring the books to the screen rather than fillet them.” He was blown away by the Slough House set (original design by Tom Burton, second season Choi Ho Man). “There are bits I swear they took straight out of my head – the bits of tinsel sticky-taped to corners of the room – drawers in which you could find stuff belonging to the characters, the debris in Jackson’s office. You don’t get to see any of this. I loved that and understood it was for the actors’ benefit.”
He is enthusiastic about Gary Oldman’s performance, and we agree he “owns” the part. Oldman is brilliant at tiny pauses preceding caustically on-target remarks (we learn to wait for them). But Herron reveals that Oldman’s Jackson is not as he imagined because he does not see his characters at all: “I don’t have a picture of Jackson, I have a voice.”
Herron resigned from his magazine job in 2017. Nowadays, he gets up every morning and heads to his flat –10 minutes from Jo’s house – usually before breakfast. He plots his books carefully but not always comprehensively before writing them. He is driven by character more than plot. “A lot of it is organic,” he says. He listens to music while he writes, “contemporary jazz mostly, a bit of modern classical.” Whenever stuck, he parks the problem. “Problems are never solved by banging my head against a wall.” Sometimes, he writes questions down. Sleeping on it sometimes helps. Or a walk might do the trick. He writes on a laptop at the dining table, but “I use the sofa a lot. I lie down and contemplate my next sentence.” He hopes – in vain – that his first draft will turn out to be a finished article: “I never leave a sentence thinking: I can come back and fix that later. But I won’t realise how broken it is until I revisit it.” Two things have refined his craft: the first was being a subeditor. “Subediting is about precise use of language and being economical, which is something I aim for – though it might not look like that,” he laughs in acknowledgment of the quantity of books he has written. But he knows that it is often the most seemingly effortless writing that requires most effort. He has the smoothest way of inflating, then casually deflating a sentence: “Time will tell, unless it doesn’t.”
The second influence on his writing has been poetry – he started as a poet. “Writing verse helped shape the kind of prose writer I’ve become. I’m a great believer in poetic form: it’s fine to write free verse, provided you know how to write a sonnet – but until you’ve learned the rules, you can’t break them. I remain aware of rhythm while writing. I know how many syllables my sentences should have. By the time I gave poetry up – or it gave me up – I was mostly interested in the ballad form. I had work published in small magazines but my career was tiny and undistinguished.” He has always been a great reader of poetry. He began with Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, then Robert Lowell and John Berryman and – “especially – Elizabeth Bishop”. His novels include a lot of modern verse and he says, “My current enthusiasms are Hannah Sullivan and Zaffar Kunial.”
About a week after our meeting, I email Herron to say I am concerned not to give the impression he is doing nothing but toil away at his writing. He replies that he travels frequently to book events, sometimes extended into walking holidays. But he stresses that “toil” is not the word: “If it felt like toiling, I’d feel badly done by. My perfect day is spent writing, reading and listening to music, followed by an evening at home with Jo and the cats.” And a final email: Tommy? “Doing well, thanks! Still confined to barracks but healing nicely. Bought him a harness this morning... about to try to fit him into it, and take him for a stroll round the garden...” And the next book, is it to be a sequel to The Secret Hours? “I’m back in Slough House now and it feels as if I’ve never been away.”
The Secret Hours by Mick Herron is published by John Murray Press (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
