Mick Herron: ‘I’m interested in incompetence, things going wrong’
This article is more than 3 years old
The Slow Horses author on the ‘virtue of limitations’ and drawing life lessons from The Wind in the Willows
Anthony Cummins
Saturday 9 July 2022
Mick Herron, 58, is the author of 19 books, most recently Bad Actors, the eighth novel in his Jackson Lamb series about a group of demoted MI5 agents. In 2013, he won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for the second instalment, Dead Lions, which Herron’s original publisher rejected on account of the poor sales of the first book, Slow Horses, now an Apple TV+ drama starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. He is on the shortlist (for a fifth time) of the Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year award (announced 23 July), for Slough House, the seventh in the series, out in paperback. Herron met me in Oxford, where he has lived ever since leaving Newcastle to study English in 1981.
In crafting his hero, Herron drew as much from Wodehouse as from le Carré.Illustration by Harol Bustos
Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?
In his “Slough House” thrillers, the screwups save the day—and there’s a very fine line between comedy and catastrophe.
By Jill Lepore
Mick Herron is a broad-shouldered Englishman with close-cropped black hair, lightly salted, and fine and long-fingered hands, like a pianist’s or a safecracker’s. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and he is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony. He does not drive a car and he does not own a smartphone, and, in the softly carpeted apartment in Oxford where, wearing woollen slippers, he writes spy novels—the best in a generation, by some estimations, and irrefutably the funniest—he does not have Wi-Fi. He used to be a copy editor. He has never been a secret agent, except insofar as all writers are spies and maybe, lately, so is everyone else.
Slow Horses author Mick Herron: ‘I love doing things that are against the rules’
This article is more than 3 months old
As the hit thriller returns to our screens, its creator talks about false starts, surprise inspirations – and why he never looks inside Jackson Lamb’s head
Lisa Allardice
Saturday 6 September 2025
It is hard to imagine anyone less like the slovenly, has-been MI5 agent Jackson Lamb than his creator, Mick Herron. “He must come deep out of my subconscious,” the 62-year-old thriller writer jokes, sipping mineral water at a rooftop bar in his home city of Oxford, a world away from London’s Aldersgate where his bestselling Slough House series is set. In a “blue shirt, white tee” (fans will get the reference), he is softly spoken with a hint of a Geordie accent. Herron is often described as the heir to John le Carré and “the best spy novelist of his generation”, according to the New Yorker. Unlike le Carré, he’s not, and never has been, a spy. Mysteriously, though, Wikipedia has given him “an entirely fictitious” birthday. “I got cards. I got a cake,” he says.
British crime writer Mick Herron wins Crime Writers’ Association lifetime achievement award
This article is more than 10 months old
The author of books such as Slow Horses and Down Cemetery Road receives the prestigious Diamond Dagger award for his contribution to the genre
Ella Creamer Thursday 23 January 2025
British writer Mick Herron, best known for his Slough House series beginning with Slow Horses, has been awarded the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Diamond Dagger award for lifetime contribution to crime writing.
Yrigger warning: the new Slough House novel shares its name, I assume accidentally, with a particularly bleak soft-play centre on London’s North Circular Road in which sticky under-fives circulate through an infernal apparatus wailing and stabbing each other with plastic forks while the grownups sit at plastic tables drinking horrible coffee and waiting for death. Just a glimpse at the dust jacket sent me back a decade to that environment of grubbiness, boredom and mild peril. It’s not that big a leap, mind. There’s something of the knockabout quality of a soft-play centre in Mick Herron’s fictional world: all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, Belinda Bauer’s obsessive world of bird egg collectors, Uketsu’s innovative Japanese detective mystery – and more
Laura Wilson Tuesday 2 December 2025
If we get the heroes we deserve, then Jackson Lamb, foul-mouthed and slovenly ringmaster of a circus of failed spies, is truly the man for our times. WithClown Town(Baskerville), the ninth book in Mick Herron’s state-of-the-nation satire/thriller mashup series, hitting the bestseller lists, and the fifth series of the Slow Horses TV adaptation streaming, this has been the author’s year. In the latest outing, Lamb and his stable of “losers, misfits and boozers” are well up to the mark as secrets about an IRA double agent threaten to come to light, exposing the seamier side of state security for a story of loyalty and betrayal.
Complicity and culpability, as well as class and professional ethics, are the subjects of Denise Mina’s The Good Liar (Harvill). When the creator of a revolutionary blood splatter probability scale realises that its flaws may have led to an unsafe conviction, she has to decide what to do about it. Tense and powerful, this is a sobering reminder of how the human element can undermine an apparently objective scientific method. The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr (Faber) ventures into similar territory to terrifying effect. It takes place in an all-too-plausible future in which the world has become reliant on a decision-making algorithm; things go catastrophically awry when the AI tool begins to feel remorse for some of its decisions, and carnage results.
Equally topical, although for different reasons, is the French author Olivier Norek’s astonishingly compelling The Winter Warriors (Open Borders, translated by Nick Caistor), which tells the true story of the Soviet Union’s 1939 invasion of Finland and the incredible feats of Simo Häyhä, the Finnish sniper so effective that Stalin’s terrified troops called him “the White Death”. The second book in Joseph O’Connor’s Rome Escape Line trilogy is another superb testament to humankind’s bravery and resilience. Continuing the story of resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Italy, The Ghosts of Rome (Harvill) is just as moving and immersive as its predecessor, My Father’s House.
The Northern Irish writer Eoin McNamee is known for literary reimaginings of real crimes, but in The Bureau (Riverrun) he uses family experience of running a bureau de change near the Irish border as the jumping-off point for a tale of black-marketeering in the 1980s, set against a background of political violence and centring on the doomed relationship between a married gangster and his young mistress. Time, place, skewed morals and machismo are powerfully evoked in beautifully spare prose.
Abigail Dean’s third novel, The Death of Us (Hemlock), deals with the impact of a crime – in this case a violent home invasion, leading to rape – on a marriage. Twenty-five years later the perpetrator, who has committed a string of similar offences, some ending in murder, is caught and tried, with the now divorced Edward and Isabel giving impact statements. Dean weaves both their points of view, past and present, for an exceptional psychological thriller that is also a love story, focusing on the years before and after the terrible event lays bare the fault lines in their relationship.
Belinda Bauer brings back Patrick Fort, protagonist of her 2013 novel Rubbernecker, in The Impossible Thing (Bantam), a tale set in the obsessive (and now illegal) world of bird egg collectors. Switching between 1920s Yorkshire, when young Celie Sheppard reverses her impoverished family’s fortunes by stealing a rare red egg from a guillemot, and the 21st century, when Patrick is trying to track down the burglar who stole an “old egg” in an ornamental box from his neighbour, this funny, moving and unpredictable novel is a treat.
The straightforward cosy crime novel is still incredibly popular, but some authors are borrowing its tropes and conventions to explore different themes. Louise Hegarty’s distinctive debut, Fair Play (Picador), is the finest example of this. It begins conventionally enough with a murder mystery-themed house party, during which a genuine death occurs. The rug is then pulled sharply and repeatedly out from under the reader’s feet as two storylines emerge: one a metafictional Golden Age pastiche, full of knowing asides and tricksy fun; the other a painfully realistic account from the point of view of the victim’s sister, lonely and confounded by grief. The result is an ingenious take on how we make sense of both life and death.
The Japanese YouTuber Uketsu, real identity unknown (he wears a papier-mache mask), is responsible for what must be the most idiosyncratically unsettling crime novel of the year. Strange Pictures(Pushkin Vertigo, translated by Jim Rion) is a sequence of connected mysteries with visual as well as narrative clues, beginning with creepy artwork by an 11-year-old girl who was arrested for matricide. It’s heartening to see that the genre remains as versatile and dynamic as ever.
