“Let me guess,” says a woman exiting a private detective’s office and finding another one coming in. “You’ve got a husband, he’s got a secretary. Am I getting warm?” So far, so Raymond Chandler, and, indeed, Zoë Boehm, first glimpsed storming out of a row with her husband, fellow gumshoe Joe Silverman, has more than a touch of hard-boiled noir about her: sardonic eyes and laughter lines, cigarette jammed into mouth, a handbag from whose depths she can produce not only vodka but a small silver gun. “I read once that you should take salt on a long journey,” she later declares. “To liven up what you catch and eat.”
But Zoë is not in the canyons and boulevards of Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles, she is in pre-millennial Oxford, the setting for Mick Herron’s first novel, Down Cemetery Road, now being reissued and adapted by Apple TV+, the makers of the award-winning Slow Horses series. Emma Thompson will play Zoë, with Ruth Wilson taking the role of Sarah Tucker, a woman whose problem is not her husband’s secretary, but the fact that one of her neighbour’s houses has just been blown up. There are four Boehm books, all to make a reappearance, providing plenty for the screenwriters to get their teeth into.
When Tucker and Boehm arrived in Herron’s mind three decades ago, the Slow Horses crew – the dissolute and jaded Jackson Lamb, brought brilliantly to life by Gary Oldman, MI5’s haughty Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) and the assorted oddballs of Slough House – were in the far future. He was living in south Oxford, working as a subeditor and jotting down ideas in scraps of free time. “The book took me a long time to write,” he tells me from his home in Summertown, at the other end of the city, “because I had a life going on. I wasn’t a professional writer. Most people didn’t know I was writing, I was a secretive kind of writer. It’s the same story as most people’s first novels, I suppose, it’s scribbled here and there in moments you can seize for yourself.”
He had an agent, but the novel was roundly rejected when first sent to publishers, before being picked up by an independent press after a change of editors. A couple of years after that, in 2003, it appeared – but it was hardly a stellar success. “Not remotely! It did get a review in the Daily Telegraph. And that was the last time I was reviewed in a national newspaper for something like 13 years, I think. And then when the Slow Horses series started picking up, around about the third novel, that was the next time that I was reviewed in the nationals. So it was a long, long time, which didn’t worry me. It’s good to get some things learned early.” What did he learn? “That I was certainly not going to be an overnight success, not a bestseller. I wasn’t going to be the kind of writer who was famous or acclaimed in any way. And that grounded me.”
Now Herron, who has just turned 61, has sales and acclaim to spare, and a shelf full of awards. He’s just been elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. But he is very definitely not the kind of writer to court celebrity: warm and friendly rather than clubbable, helpful rather than self-promoting, naturally reserved rather than shy. He enjoys a quiet home life in north Oxford with his partner, Jo, and their cats, and laughs at suggestions that this is precisely the kind of cover story a real spy would establish.
He has consistently and modestly resisted the comparisons to John le Carré made by many critics, and when I remark that the imagined conflict in the background of Down Cemetery Road suggests his prescience about the inevitability of a return of war in Iraq a few years after the book’s setting, he shrugs it off: “In a way, yes. I did not foresee, though, that they were going to put barriers up at Oxford railway station, so you can no longer just wander on to the platform. That happened before the book was published, but at the time of writing, it was perfectly possible to do what the characters in the book do. So I wasn’t prescient on all events. Geopolitics I was fine with, but local detail … ”
Nonetheless, a certain degree of literary celebrity has attached itself to him – so much so that Mick Jagger co-wrote his first ever TV theme tune, the eerie Strange Game, on which he also sings and plays harmonica to accompany Slow Horses. Again, Herron downplays his part in the show’s undoubted success. “I’ve been hugely lucky with the casting of it all, but I think a lot of it does hang on Gary. Once Gary took the role, then everybody wanted to play. Who wouldn’t? It made so many things possible,” he says. Even in an enormously strong ensemble cast, Oldman’s turn as boozy, flatulent Lamb, constantly berating his charges and playing cat and mouse with Scott Thomas’s icy Diana Taverner, steals the show.
Lamb has to contend with the youthful enthusiasm of River Cartwright, who is desperate to get his derailed career back on track after he is scapegoated when a training exercise goes catastrophically wrong, and, here, Herron does admit to a little foresight, or at least consonance. “I don’t have much of a visual imagination. I don’t have pictures of characters in my head, with a couple of exceptions, and River Cartwright was one. I did know what he looked like, and Jack Lowden is it. Jack Lowden is probably a bit better looking, but even so he’s very, very close to what I imagined, so it is quite fantastic to watch.”
The key to understanding the Slow Horses universe is that, for all the verve and thrill with which the ins and outs of espionage are depicted, it is essentially about people messing up and having to live with the consequences. And, although their cock-ups are of a different type and magnitude to the slog to get a debut novel out into the world, Herron wonders whether that’s where it all started. “When I look back on it,” he ruminates now, “that’s probably one of the reasons why I started to write about failures, about people who are thwarted in their ambitions. It’s not a massive leap to see that. I just speculate on that, rather than offer it as a concrete reason why my writing went in the direction that it did, but, looking back, I think in a way it seems quite obvious.”
He was hardly a failure – gainfully employed and, at the point when he started thinking of Lamb et al, commuting daily from Oxford to London to work for a legal research firm – but he wasn’t quite where he wanted to be. What made him stick at it? “A lot of people do give up. But, on the other hand, the world is full of people who are writing who’ve never been published at all, but wouldn’t dream of giving up because it’s what they’re doing with their heart, it’s the core of their being. And I’m one of those writers. I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”
It is, he continues, the way he makes sense of things around him, and has done since he was a child, growing up happily as one of six children in Jesmond, Newcastle. Until he was eight, the family lived in a flat above his father’s optician’s shop; not having a car, they let out their garage to an inventor called Mr Bortoloni. Herron was, he remembers, living most of his time in an imaginary world. Was it full of spies and detectives and the kind of hyperviolence that occasionally splashes across his pages? He laughs. “No, I don’t think so! It was probably heavily plotted, but it certainly wasn’t violent. I didn’t have violent fantasies of any kind. It was more alternative lives, I suppose: what might have happened, certainly by the time I was into my early 20s or so. And by that stage, you’re thinking, if I’d done something else rather than this, what life would I be living? If you’re an introverted, introspective type of person, you can spend quite a lot of time thinking about such things.”
He is clear that character is where all his work starts, and that his intricate plots – Down Cemetery Road features explosions, murders, ex-soldiers on the run, a pair of psychopathic brothers, a child abduction and high-level intelligence cover-ups – are a “maypole around which the characters dance”. The maypole, he says, can be changed at quite a late stage, and “that’s really how plot works in my books. The driving force, the trigger elements of it, the things that cause all the action to happen, it’s more a MacGuffin.” He can’t – or, perhaps, won’t – envisage writing outside the espionage and crime genre because he values the framework and structure it provides, although he is also drawn to the malleability of genre writing. In Bad Actors, the most recent of the Slough House series, there’s an unbroken sequence of 20,000 words, a writing challenge he set himself to see if it could be pulled off “within the confines of a perfectly ordinary thriller”.
None of Herron’s books are perfectly ordinary; all have a deep hinterland. When he kills off a character, he wants to explore grief; when he pictures the cut-throat world of MI5, he is interested in dissecting how bureaucracies and large organisations become dysfunctional. When he started writing Jackson Lamb, he recalls: “I was putting on a much more cynical voice than I perhaps felt particularly. It was very much the narrative voice that I decided to adopt.” That voice – in his own words “cold-eyed and sarcastic”, but as fans will attest filled with deadpan humour and drily accurate observation – is what has propelled the series forward through eight books, with Herron back at his desk finishing the ninth.
It’s also become less of a consciously adopted voice, he thinks. He agrees when I say that I think the books have become angrier over time, and puts that down at least partly to a worsening of political behaviour and the seemingly endless instances of governmental corruption. Does he feel that institutions themselves beget corruption, that office will always breed abuse, or is he more optimistic than that? Certainly, he replies, he doesn’t take the view that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, all governments will be the same.
“On the other hand, I think a lot of what I’m writing about isn’t politics, it’s politicking. It’s the manner in which agendas are carried out. And I do think that regardless of who is in government, there’s going to be a secret element of power wielding … And this is essentially what I’m writing about: it doesn’t matter what the aims of any given organisation are, there are going to be people in those organisations. And, therefore, there will be any manner of petty jealousies, ambitions, spitefulness, kindness. The stuff that goes on in the back rooms.”
Whether or not he himself is angrier is a moot point. Why, I ask him, does he think that a person who seems so measured, so calm and grounded, finds himself returning again and again to these volatile, provocative and unpredictable characters?
“It’s an interesting question. Maybe it’s because I’m non-confrontational, and this is where I get that out; I don’t have to be, because I can do it on the page. It’s like what they always say about crime writers – we’re a very amenable, friendly bunch, because we do all our murdering on the page. And it might be an aspect of that: I can unleash myself or the inner demons on paper and don’t have to in real life.” He smiles. “On the other hand, that might be a load of bollocks.”
• Mick Herron will be speaking about Down Cemetery Road on 1 August at Waterstones, Oxford. Tickets available via their website. Down Cemetery Road is being reissued by John Murray. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. The Apple TV series is currently set for an early 2025 release.
