It took Mick Herron fourteen years to become an overnight success. Though his debut novel was published in 2003, it wasn't until 2017 that another – Slow Horses, the first in the bestselling spy series that inspired a hit Apple TV+ show – was finally named thriller of the month by Waterstones, and a literary star was born.
Clown Town (Baskerville, Thursday 11th September) is the ninth book set in the world of Slough House, the grotty offices in Aldersgate Street, in the City of London, of MI5’s misfits, exiles and failures, overseen by the flatulent, obnoxious Jackson Lamb (captured to perfection onscreen by Gary Oldman). To give you a flavour: “In Slough House, pretending to be working was so much part of the agenda, it counted as working.”
Meanwhile, the fifth series of the show launches on Wednesday 24th September. In January, Herron, now 62, was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Diamond Dagger, the genre’s highest accolade. And, as if all that wasn’t enough, a streaming adaptation of his earlier Zoë Boehm detective series, starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, is in the works.
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Whatever the opposite of “side” is, the author has it in spades. Puckish and amiable in person, he regards the huge success of the past eight years as a bonus. “I was perfectly happy,” he says. “It’s not like I was seething away at my ‘failure’. As far as I was concerned, I was successful - I had a job as a sub-editor on a legal journal], I had food on my table, I had a roof over my head, I was publishing novels. I mean, I didn't have many readers! But they were there on the shelf behind me when I was working. I could look up and see, you know, five, six books there”.
Clown Town is Herron at his masterly best, a stylish page-turner that was loosely inspired by the real-life case of Freddie Scappaticci, the senior IRA officer recruited by the British Army as agent “Stakeknife” – an operation that went horribly out of control.
“I had a conversation with somebody who was in a position to know, shall we say, and I simply asked: "What's the worst thing that the intelligence services have ever been involved in?” Without any pause, they said: ‘Stakeknife’.”
With that initial inspiration, Herron let his imagination rip and crafted a plot that would set Lamb and his agents, including River Cartwright (played by Jack Lowden in the series), on the trail of a decades-old cold case raised from the dead to trouble the spooks.
In this sense, the Slow Horses’ down-at-heel office building is a kind of haunted house. “It’s not something that was there from the start. Slough House has become a kind of repository of the ghosts of the service, of the people who worked there. And that's very useful to me as a writer”.
That said, Herron’s thrillers are fiercely contemporary and have become a hugely enjoyable narrative accompaniment to the Brexit era. If John le Carré’s novels suited the postwar age of imperial decline, the tales of the Slow Horses have matched the muddle, shoddiness and loss of status of post-Brexit Britain.
“Brexit was certainly the trigger for London Rules (2018),” he says. '”And, kind of retrospectively, it affects the earlier books in a strange sort of way. That’s when the readership started to take off.”
Peter Judd, the former Conservative Home Secretary, is back in Clown Town, bearing more than a passing resemblance to Boris Johnson, a contemporary of Herron at Balliol College, Oxford. “Anyway, we needn’t go into that!” he says, laughing.
And there is a new government, recognisably Keir Starmer’s, though not explicitly identified as such. As the head of MI5, Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas in the series) reflects, it has “hit the ground runny, like a jelly that hadn’t quite set” – a classic example of Herron’s love of wordplay. As for the unnamed prime minister, it is clear to Taverner that his “great electoral advantage had consisted of his not being one of his five immediate predecessors”. Ouch.
Liz Truss, Dominic Cummings, and Nigel Farage are all name-checked. But Herron is not a political commentator. What interests him is how institutions and power work, “Whitehall and the machinery of politics” and how human folly can have catastrophic consequences.
He's also fascinated by the cut-and-thrust of everyday office life: the banter, the scheming, the arguments over the tea kitty. “The human condition has always been the aspect of it that's interested me. It's the people - the fact that they are spies, odd as it sounds to say it, is, in a way, incidental”.
At the heart of it all is Lamb, “like a sleeping bag stuffed with potatoes”: not remotely sentimental – important, as there is a high fatality rate in Herron’s books – but bound by an old-school code of espionage. “Activating the code, me coming up with a plot, is simply finding a way of triggering Jackson’s code,” Herron says, “which will call him into action, as it were”.
It is essential, too, that we never truly know the mysteries of Lamb’s damaged but resilient soul – an enigma that has made him one of the great literary characters of our time. What little he reveals of himself emerges from his jagged dialogue with two women: Taverner and Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves on-screen), the quick-witted recovering alcoholic who keeps the shambolic machine of Slough House (just about) ticking over.
“I think it's important to hold back with him because either he means everything he says - in which case he'd be intolerable, there'd be no way you couldn't have an affection for him. Or he doesn't, in which case there's no threat there.” When Lamb calls River, recovering from a brush with death, “Uh-Oh Seven”, is his contempt genuine or not? It’s left to the reader to decide.
Now, his first fictional creation, Zoë Boehm, a private investigator in Oxford, is also heading for our screens. Emma Thompson (pictured in character below), as it happens, was already a fan of Herron’s writing, and has written a foreword for the new edition of the first book in the series, Down Cemetery Road.
“Morwenna Banks is the lead writer on that,” he says. “A wonderful woman, very, very talented. She's done a lovely job. The scripts are great.” Like le Carré, Herron enjoys making brief cameos in adaptations of his work. “Jo, my partner, and I walk in front of Emma on Paddington Station - bringing my old commuting skills back to life!”
As he has done during the production of Slow Horses, he has again visited the writers’ room to answer any questions that arise. “A lot of it is quite specific – ‘How come this happens?’ or ‘We can't do what you've done in the book because that's happening in somebody's head. How do we get that information, you know, from that character that character?’”
For now, Herron is busy on a standalone spy novel. Suffice to say, though, that Clown Town ends with the promise of further clandestine adventures for Jackson Lamb and his gang of outcasts. “I like to leave something hanging so that when I come to the next book. I know I'm going to have to deal with that. But I haven’t even thought about it yet!”
I bet he has, though.
