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?
***
***
“Have you ever met him?” I asked Herron, as Howard came down the stairs.
“I was in the same room with him once,” he offered. At a party.
“And you didn’t go say hello?”
He shook his head.
“Le Carré?” Howard piped up. “I’ve met him.” She’d been trying very hard to stay away, but it was nearly time to leave. “I sat next to him once, twice, at book events,” she said. “Oh, and I’ve got . . .” She crossed the room, pulled “The Night Manager” off a shelf, and flipped to the title page, signed “For Jo, from John le Carré,” and then opened her copy of “The Tailor of Panama,” inscribed “For Jo, really, with all good wishes, from David—really.” The old bastard.
Spy fiction flourished during the Cold War, but that war is over, and Mick Herron is a civilian, so far as anyone knows, writing about espionage in the age of terror: domestic surveillance, homeland security, CCTV, and taking your shoes off to get on an airplane. Le Carré wrote about Moscow rules; Herron added London rules. Moscow rules: watch your back. London rules: cover your ass. The Slough House books are haunted by the Cold War. Lamb is a service legend; at some point, he went undercover in Berlin, and there are veiled hints that he was captured and tortured by the Stasi. He has a mysterious history with the whip-smart Molly Doran, M.I.5’s archivist, who’s in a wheelchair: her legs got blown off. Lamb, differently damaged, came home, Herron writes, “in that blissful break when the world seemed a safer place, between the end of the Cold War and about ten minutes later.”
Le Carré’s George Smiley embodied the Cold War-era decline of the British Empire—upright and betrayed, his disposition of quiet, keep-calm-and-carry-on forbearance a proxy for Britain itself. “Lamb’s position is: I’ve had enough of this, so you can all fuck off,” Herron says. Lamb is Britain in the age of Brexit: angry, embarrassed, and coming apart at the seams.
Herron cleared away the coffee crockery and came back from the kitchen with a handful of treats for the kittens. “Don’t worry,” he whispered to them, kneeling down. “We’ll be back soon.”
Howard rounded up jackets and car keys. Then she remembered one last thing, and switched on the television to set up Netflix for the cat-sitter. The BBC blinked on: a young, shaken reporter stood outside 10 Downing Street. The Prime Minister was about to make an announcement. We sat back down on the sofas, gripped.
“Oi!” Jackson Lamb might have growled from his office on the top floor of Slough House, fishing a cigarette out of one pocket and a lighter out of another. “Tory Spice is on the telly!”
When Truss, at the age of forty-seven, became Prime Minister, The Economistpredicted that she’d have “roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce,” and a tabloid started a contest, live-streaming a head of iceberg and asking which would last longer. “You knew where you stood with the lettuce,” Herron said.
Truss stepped up to the lectern and resigned, becoming the shortest-lived Prime Minister in British history. “Supermarket salad is crowned winner,” the Guardian reported later that day. Herron stood up, sighed, and turned off the set.
“I’m a radical feminist, as you know,” Lamb might have said, stubbing out his cigarette. “But the hot flashes always get these old girls in the end.”
***
The road from Oxford to Ledbury is lined by drystone walls and black-faced sheep. For the longest time, Howard’s car slogged along behind a sluggish gray truck with a single word painted on the back, in red: “Horses.” Howard thumped at the steering wheel, frustrated. “Slow horses,” Herron said, delighted.
Jackson Lamb loves all manner of wordplay. “It’s the only thing he takes pleasure in,” Herron tells me. In one scene, Lamb meets Molly Doran in a church and makes a fuss, moaning and groaning as he settles, wearily, into a pew. Doran turns her wheelchair around to face him:
Lamb owes as much to P. G. Wodehouse as he does to le Carré; he’s got something of the extremity of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Stilton Cheesewright, and Lord Emsworth. The Wall Street Journal compared Herron to Evelyn Waugh. Herron also pays his dues to Dickens, referring, at one point, to Lamb’s secretary, Catherine Standish, as Miss Havisham. Or consider this:
To play Lamb, Gary Oldman told me, “all I’ve had to do is follow the signposts.” But it’s a brilliant, unmissable performance. He loves playing Lamb. “Me walking around with my greasy hair and my crumpled overcoat,” he said, laughing. “It’s delicious.” He sees Smiley and Lamb as connected: “They’re both disgusted, and they both want to walk away. But they’re addicted, addictedto this life.”
Slough House is bleaker than Bleak House. Also, as readers are told, “Slough House is not in Slough, nor is it a house.” It’s just so far from everything else that it might as well be in Slough. It is, in fact, in London, on Aldersgate Street, next to a Chinese takeout and near the Barbican tube station. (Herron used to walk down Aldersgate on his way to work.) You can find it on Google Maps. “Equally as important as Holmes
“A double yolker!” Herron and Howard shouted out as we passed a pub.
“What?”
“Two yellow cars,” Herron explained.
Yellow car is a game the slow horses play when they’re very, very bored. You see a yellow car and you say, “Yellow car.” Unless, apparently, you see two.
Slough House / slow horses: that’s just plain wordplay. But to see only the wordplay in Herron’s writing is to miss the lyricism: “The owl flew screaming from the barn, its wingtips bright with flame. For a moment, silhouetted against the blank sky, it was a dying angel, scorched by its own divinity, and then it was just a sooty husk, dropping like an anvil into the nearby trees.” And to focus on the horsing around is to miss the terror. Diana Taverner—“Lady Di,” behind her back—is as fierce and cunning as le Carré’s Karla. She “wore her authority as she might an ermine gown: it kept her warm, and people noticed it.” In one scene, a staffer tells her that an enemy agent has just been assassinated, on her orders:
Early on, when Boris Johnson was still the mayor of London, Herron often drew his characters from life:
As the years have rolled by, Herron hasn’t lacked for material.
“I’ve gotten some angry letters from people who accused me of having disdain for Trump,” Herron said. “I think that’s a misreading. I was going for contempt.”
“There’s a Donald Trump Junior?” Lamb asks, incredulous. “And just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse.”
***
In Ledbury, a half-timbered medieval market town in Herefordshire, Herron and Howard and I checked into the Feathers Hotel, built around 1565 on the post route from Cheltenham to Aberystwyth. In a lobby with antlers on the walls and overstuffed upholstered furniture, we met the writers Sarah Hilary and Andrew Taylor, along with Taylor’s wife, Caroline. We were all going to have a quick dinner before heading to a discussion about crime writing, part of a series called “Ledburied.”
We walked a few doors down to a posh Italian restaurant. The sun set as we pondered the menu.
“Wine?” Hilary asked, effervescent and organized.
“No wine,” Taylor said. “We have to keep our heads.”
It turns out that crime writers like Italian, especially risotto. Mostly, though, the talk was of agents and editors. When Herron first drafted “Slow Horses,” he planned to blow up Slough House. (He kills off characters all the time: “It’s not a thriller if it’s not thrilling.”) But then he decided he might want to stay a little longer in that house and reimagined the ending. The book came out in 2010; a couple of years later, he finished a sequel, “Dead Lions.” This winter, it’s Season 2 of the Apple series. At the time, however, he couldn’t find a publisher in his own country.
He recalled, “One publisher asked, ‘What even is this? Is it a thriller or is it a comedy?’ Also, no one wanted to publish a sequel when they hadn’t published the first book.” Herron figured, O.K., I guess I’ll never be a full-time writer. But then Juliet Grames, who runs the crime imprint at Soho, an independent American publisher, came along. “I read ‘Dead Lions’ and I said, ‘We have to publish this,’ ” Grames told me. Soho bought the rights to “Slow Horses,” too, but, she says, “we could not get people to listen to us about this guy.” Then, in the U.K., Mark Richards, an editor at the distinguished press John Murray, happened to pick up a copy of “Slow Horses” at the Liverpool Street railway station. Richards’s colleagues see him as the “furniture restorer,” because he can look at an unloved, threadbare sofa and spot its quality. He bought the rights to the first two Slough House books. Not long afterward, Britons voted for Brexit and Americans elected Trump. Suddenly, Peter Judd and the Sons of Albion didn’t seem so far-fetched. The Daily Telegraph dubbed “Slow Horses” one of the best spy novels ever written.
The risotto arrived. “P. D. James,” Hilary began, “once showed up to a book event only to find the bookstore closed and on the locked door a sign reading—”
“Event cancelled for lack of interest,” Herron finished.
“And that wasn’t even at the start of her career,” Taylor put in.
To be a writer of genre fiction is to belong to something akin to an honorable medieval guild. Taylor’s newest book, “The Royal Secret,” is the latest in his series of best-selling thrillers set in seventeenth-century London. When Herron was saddled with being called spy fiction’s “best-kept secret,” Taylor wrote a review in which he said that Herron writes like Raymond Chandler, except better. Both Herron and Taylor blurbed Hilary’s spooky novel “Fragile.” Herron called it “a dark river.”
“Hey, I have my new book jacket!” Hilary remembered. She pulled out her phone to show us the spare and beautiful cover of “Blackthorn.” “They made it into two words,” she said. Everyone agreed that had been the right decision, design-wise.
“Don’t you people ever talk about bloody axes and fingerprints and serial killers?” I asked, disappointed.
“Once, someone collapsed while I was giving a reading,” Herron offered. “Or, no, that happened twice.” Fainted. “Or maybe he was asleep?” No one had died, though.
Hilary put down her fork. “People say it, but it’s true. Crime writers get all their gruesomeness out on the page. In person, they’re the nicest people.”
“It’s the romance writers you have to look out for,” Herron said. “Blood on the carpet, those people.”
After dinner, I followed them down a dark, cobbled alley and into Burgage Hall, a packed space noisy with clatter and gossip and smelling of woodsmoke and damp wool. Stacks of books were piled on folding tables where wine and juice had been poured into plastic cups. A lectern had been pushed to a corner. Old men unbuttoned their coats and doffed their caps; old women settled on seats. You could hear the squelch of muck boots and the chattering of knitting needles. “Secrets and Spies” was the evening’s theme. It might have been a garden-club meeting.
***
In the morning, Howard headed out to go hiking in the Malvern Hills, and Herron and I boarded a train to Oxford. We sat at a laminated table, face to face, watching rain streak the windows as we sped through the sodden countryside. “See It, Say It, Sorted,” the signs above every door read, flashing green pixels.
In the age of terror, everyone’s on the lookout, on trains, buses, and airplanes—not just under surveillance but conducting it. If you see something, say something. Lamb complains, “It’s like everyone’s a fucking spy.”
I’d listened to each of Herron’s novels as audiobooks, performed by wonderfully versatile actors, with AirPods in my ears. I’d felt like a secret agent, eavesdropping. (Julia Franklin, who recorded the Oxford series, and Gerard Doyle and Seán Barrett, who recorded the Jackson Lamb books, all told me they had to stop reading for laughing.) Reading Herron, or listening to him, is like riding on a carrousel and switching animals every time it goes around. You’re in one person’s head, and then you’re in someone else’s, except, unnervingly, you’re hardly ever in Lamb’s. He’s a cipher, forever undercover.
Every passenger who traipsed past us on the train, wetly squeezing down the aisle, was noted by Herron, absently, as if he were tucking them away in a catalogue of humanity. His slow horses come in every type, and they got kicked out of the service for every imaginable screwup. River Cartwright failed a training exercise. Min Harper left a disk labelled “Top Secret” on a train. Louisa Guy lost a gun seller she was tailing. Marcus Longridge, who is Black, is a gambler; and Shirley Dander, of ambiguous sexuality (don’t ask her), is a coke addict. Roderick Ho, a computer whiz played on the Apple series by Christopher Chung, got sent to Slough House because he’s a twit.
Ho is himself a kind of writer, an inventor of fictional worlds; it amazes him that he can “build a man from links and screenshots, launch him into the world like a paper boat, and he’d just keep sailing.” Herron loves Ho, the spy writer lost in a world of his own invention. “There may come a point where I have to let him grow up a bit,” he admitted, “but then I’d probably have to kill him.”
The office banter is brutal: “While Louisa Guy has been known to speculate that Ho occupies a place somewhere on the right of the autism spectrum, Min Harper has habitually responded that he’s also way out there on the git index.” When Longridge insults Peter Judd and Dander warns him that he’s using hate speech, Longridge snaps, “Of course it’s hate speech. I fucking hate him.”
“I’ve had readers who assume I’m waging a war against political correctness,” Herron said, plainly exasperated. “I am not. I’m absolutely all for treating one another decently. I don’t think Lamb’s waging that war, either.” Lamb’s playing with words and taking the piss:
Lamb’s also trying to get the people who work for him to quit, because he’s worried about them getting killed. Most of what he does is done to save them. When a bad actor sneaks into Molly Doran’s Records Department and she orders him out and he says he doesn’t “take instructions from a crip,” Lamb finds the guy, breaks both of his legs, and asks him, “Who’s the crip now?”
Herron’s phone rang. It was Howard, calling to make sure we’d caught the train, and asking Herron if he could pick up some sneakers she’d forgotten at the house.
“Yes, yes,” Herron said. “Bye, sweetheart.” And to me: “It’s too wet to go walking. She’s gone to the shops.” We stared out at the slashing rain.
Herron also loves writing Catherine Standish, to whom he’s given the most fully developed backstory—a disordered and drunken past, fatally tied to Lamb’s own darkest deeds. “She’s more aware than any of the others how very badly her life could have gone,” Herron said. “I have that sense about my own life.”
In 2017, after the books began to take off, Herron quit his day job. Not long afterward, he went to a sales-and-marketing meeting at John Murray. The name of the series had been changed from the Slough House mysteries to the Jackson Lamb Thrillers. He was shown posters, ads, and merchandise, down to drink coasters printed with Lambisms: “When am I not full of joie de fucking vivre?”
“You do realize,” Herron told the execs slowly, “that in the book I’m writing right now I kill him off?”
Silence. Fidgeting. More silence. “You’re having us on, yeah?”
***
through flooded tracks, the train spluttered to a halt at Charlbury, a whistle-stop town on the edge of the Cotswolds about twenty minutes from Oxford. A few passengers got on, umbrellas trailing them like tails. The doors closed. The train sat still as stone, rain pattering, wind rattling. Eventually, over the speaker system the conductor said something that no one could understand for the static, leaving everyone as mystified as slow horses stuck on the underground. “Signalling problems,” a character muses in the third of the Slough House books. “These were often caused by heat, when they weren’t caused by cold, or by things being wet, or dry.”
People started mumbling, grumbling, texting. Ten minutes in, the conductor’s voice came back—hollering now—to announce that the brakes were stuck and that it would take at least an hour to get them unstuck. Brexit budget cuts?
Herron and I trudged out of the train and into the rain. The one-room station was closed. There were no buses into town, or anywhere. No Ubers, no Lyfts. No taxi stand. In slickers, we huddled under the station’s overhanging roof with half a dozen other stranded passengers, including a rosy-cheeked young man and his father, wearing long woollen coats. They’d travelled from Worcestershire, and the son, who couldn’t have been much more than twenty, was on his way to London for a job interview, his first.
“You’ll get there,” Herron assured him. “What’s the job?”
“Fund accountancy.”
“Oh, right. Not to worry. It’s not far. You’ll be fine.”
The job candidate nodded gratefully. Everyone tried calling taxi companies, using cell phones like road flares. No one answered. The rain picked up, and then the wind. It grew, suddenly, quite cold. We were late, we were soaked, and now we were freezing.
“When we get into Oxford,” Herron told me, “I’ve arranged for you to be mugged. Then the food poisoning will kick in around four.”
At last, a taxi pulled up. Two women dressed in fur coats and high boots emerged from the train, dry as toast, and climbed inside. Herron and the aspiring fund accountant’s father dashed out into the rain and begged them to take one more passenger. The son squeezed into the back seat. Herron rapped the car window. “Good luck,” he said. “You’ll be great.”
He ran back under the station roof, shivering.
Moscow rules: watch your back. London rules: cover your ass. Slough House rules: everywhere is joe country. Herron rubbed his hands for warmth and tried to wipe the raindrops from his glasses. My notebook was drenched. I asked him why he avoids writing from inside Jackson Lamb’s head, and he said, “Because I don’t want to break him.” The rain fell like a veil. ♦
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