From page to screen: Mick Herron conquers television

Katie Rosseinsky, The Independent

When Mick Herron presented the manuscript for Dead Lions, the second novel in his Slough House espionage series, to his then-publisher, some time in the early 2010s, their response was a resounding “no”. Slow Horses, his first book about the curmudgeonly, indefatigably flatulent spy Jackson Lamb and his motley crew of washed-up fellow operatives, had sold badly, and the company wasn’t about to take a chance on another potential flop.

Fast-forward a decade and a half or so, and Herron’s own story has enjoyed a series of remarkable plot twists and turnarounds (ones that he would probably reject as too fanciful). His books have sold millions of copies around the world, and garnered comparisons to John le Carré, the master of the modern spy novel; in 2022, a New Yorker headline asked if Herron was “the best spy novelist of his generation”. The past month or so alone has seen the release of Clown Town, his ninth Slough House book, and the launch of the fifth season of Slow Horses, the Emmy-winning TV adaptation starring Gary Oldman as Lamb; the sixth series is already in the can, and production is about to begin on the seventh.

And this week, a new series, Down Cemetery Road, based on Herron’s debut novel and starring two acting powerhouses in Ruth Wilson and Emma Thompson, will debut on Apple TV. It shares plenty of the same storytelling DNA with the Slow Horses saga — clever tonal shifts between light and dark, an eye for institutional cover-ups, outsiders taking matters into their own slightly amateurish hands — but has a style and a spikiness all of its own. It’s guaranteed to appeal to fans of Lamb and co, and also cements Herron’s position as prestige TV’s most in-demand author.

Herron, now 62, studied English at Oxford and dabbled in writing poetry before finding steadier work as a copy editor at a legal journal that specialised in employment law. He’d travel home from his day job and try to write a few hundred words of a novel, eventually deciding to focus on crime fiction (“I was attracted by the idea of there being scaffolding,” he later told The New Yorker). A few of his efforts remained unpublished, but eventually Down Cemetery Road piqued the interest of publishers, and was released in 2003; three further Oxford-set novels featuring private investigator Zoe Boehm followed, but none of them seemed to crack the mainstream.

Slow Horses was published in 2010, and Herron was dropped by his UK publisher a few years later. In a strange twist, given just how British the novels feel in tone and subject matter, his American publishers were the only ones who wanted the second book, Dead Lions; they entered it for the prestigious Crime Writers Association Golden Dagger award in 2013, and it ended up winning. John Murray, an imprint of UK mega-publishers Hachette, picked up the rights to Herron’s work soon after.

In 2017, a rave review on American broadcasting network NPR and a surprising spot as Waterstones’ Book of the Month (seven years after publication, no less) helped create word-of-mouth buzz, but Herron remained a slightly insiderish favourite, something of crime fiction’s best-kept secret, until the TV adaptation of Slow Horses was released in 2022.

It has been a convoluted route to the top for Herron, then, but his long slog to stardom has also made him a brilliant chronicler of failure. This ability to dramatise and bungling ineptitude is arguably what makes his literary (and TV) worlds so irresistible, and so strangely prescient. In Slow Horses, his characters have all been banished to a sort of purgatory for rubbish secret agents, after displaying some vast incompetence that has rendered them unfit for “proper” spying.