Before he published his first spy novel, Slow Horses, and before Gary Oldman shuffled through Slough House in an irascible, flatulent haze, Mick Herron wrote Down Cemetery Road, about an Oxford private eye called Zoë Boehm. It was excellent, that mordant Herron narrative voice, so vital to the success of Slow Horses’ Apple TV adaptation, already permeating the pages.
Little wonder, then, his 2003 debut has now been given the Apple treatment. Emma Thompson plays the cynical, spiky-haired Boehm; Ruth Wilson is art restorer Sarah Tucker, who hires the investigator after her excruciating dinner party is abruptly ended by a gas main exploding on her quiet street. It’s adapted by Morwenna Banks, a scriptwriter on Slow Horses; the result is a detective-story-cum-adventure-yarn that grows on you the more the bodies pile up. Oxford hasn’t seen this many murders since Inspector Morse. Far from cosy Sunday-night fare, though, Down Cemetery Road is an increasingly nervy exercise in paranoia, an eight-part mystery that taps into the national mood of institutional distrust amid a fug of bureaucratic malaise. Some clever commissioning, that.
