From Slow Horses to Down Cemetery Road: Why Mick Herron is TV’s new favourite author

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 A few of his efforts remained unpublished, but eventually Down Cemetery Road piqued the interest of publishers, and was released in 2003; three further Oxford-set novels featuring private investigator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.

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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 f***-ups 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.

None of them have done anything treasonous or ideologically driven; they are not Kim Philby-esque double agents who have been caught. They’ve just left important files on trains after a rough day at work, or crashed out of a compulsory training exercise.

It’s espionage with the glamour taken out: though you might not think that would necessarily be particularly appealing on screen (one of the first scenes in Slow Horses features Jack Lowden’s River Cartwright sorting through a bin bag of detritus), it really works. It’s spying, cut through with the administrative mess-ups and scathing workplace insults of The Thick of It (Will Smith, showrunner for five seasons of Slow Horses, acted in and wrote for Armando Iannucci’s political comedy).

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This bleak, slightly banal worldview seems to chime perfectly with the moment in which we find ourselves now, where politics seems to venture into parodic territory, facts can be stretched beyond recognition and institutions regularly seem to fail to fulfil their most basic functions. It’s perhaps not all surprising that Herron’s books seem to have become increasingly popular in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. “I’m interested in incompetence, things going wrong, badly motivated stuff, and that’s essentially our political reality now,” he told The Guardian in 2022. “It gives me plenty of scope, but I don’t feel good about it.”

Down Cemetery Road shares a similarly cynical sense of humour and worldview. Sarah, played by Ruth Wilson, is hosting the sort of dinner party that makes you shudder in second-hand embarrassment, bringing together her banker husband’s wealthy client and her own hippyish friends (one of whom is, inexplicably, named Wigwam). The tension between them all culminates in a literal explosion when a nearby house blows up, killing two of its residents.

The third, a young girl named Dinah, disappears soon after, and Sarah becomes obsessed with finding her. Her fixation prompts her to seek out the services of husband and wife private investigators Zoe Boehm (Emma Thompson) and Joe Silverman (Adam Godley); all of them end up getting entangled in a conspiracy that is much bigger and much bleaker than it first appears.

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Inevitably, for a book published two decades ago, Down Cemetery Road required a bit of tinkering to bring it up to date: the novel’s era is resolutely analogue, meaning there are plenty of scenes involving payphones and loose change, directory enquiries and, my personal favourite, Zoe dialling “1471” to pinpoint Sarah’s last known location (none of these feature in the show, of course).

The screen version, adapted by Morwenna Banks, also a veteran of the Slow Horses writers’ room, is remarkably good at shifting gears. One moment, we’re faced with a brutal act of violence, or a jaw-dropping reveal; the next, it’s devastating insults and the almost slapstick humour of getting trapped in the loo while attempting to sneak around a house, or chomping into a massive merengue just as you’re receiving a particularly grim case file of evidence.

Thompson’s Zoe Boehm is responsible for both of those silly reprieves from tension; dressed in a sort of steampunk-style leather jacket and with her hair teased up into spikes, she’s magnificently strident in the role, and her very recognisable cadences chime perfectly with the rhythm of Herron’s one-liners (“Does everything you say have to be really horrible?” Sarah remonstrates with her after one particularly cutting insult).

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It’s not just the rapid switches in tone that keep you glued to Herron’s stories, though: he is also completely fearless about killing off characters that other, less bold authors might want to keep hanging around. If you’ve seen the first season of Slow Horses, you’ll know that a major character gets bumped off early on, and the same thing keeps happening as the show progresses. Down Cemetery Road is similarly unsentimental about getting rid of seemingly key figures early on. It’s a Game of Thrones-esque trait that ensures we viewers must be constantly on our toes; complacency has no place here.

At a time when so many screen thrillers feel rote and stale, as if they’ve been algorithmically conceived or designed to be watched while scrolling social media, it’s no surprise that viewers (and commissioners) can’t get enough of Herron’s knotty, ambiguous and unabashedly clever plots and oddball characters. Beyond the Slough House and Zoe Boehm detective series, he’s also written a handful of standalone books and short stories. It’s probably only a matter of time before they are given the glossy TV treatment. I’m sure various national treasures are greedily eyeing up the lead roles right now – and checking to see how soon they’d be killed off.

‘Down Cemetery Road’ is on Apple TV now