Mick Herron in Conversation at Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival

By Sarah Morgan, July 2025

“I know how, where and when Jackson Lamb dies.”

Those will be incredible words for any fans of the Slough House novels and its TV adaptation, Slow Horses, to hear, particularly as they come from the mouth of the man who created the character, Mick Herron.

He’s been in Harrogate recently as the chairperson of this year’s Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. As usual, the event was a phenomenal success with some amazing guests, but it was Herron’s own chat about his work and the small screen take on it that proved to be the main draw, with standing room only in the main marquee at the Old Swan Hotel.

For the uninitiated, the award-winning Slough House novels focus on a group of failed spies, a mismatched group of individuals who have been banished to an unprepossessing office building near London’s Barbican.

Before Herron started work on Slow Horses, the first novel in the franchise, he’d been writing a series about Oxford-based private eye Zoë Boehm. “I thought I’d write Slow Horses as a standalone and go back to Zoe,” he remembers. “I was originally going to blow up Slough House, but then I thought, ‘I’m enjoying these characters, I think I’ll bring them back’.”

That was in “2008. Seventeen years ago, on a Tuesday. If I’d known how it would all develop, I would probably have been paralysed. Writing for me is just getting the stuff on the page. The rest is just extra.”

What may surprise some is that it wasn’t Jackson Lamb, the famed, feared and, in some cases, despised ruler of the Slough House team that first sprang to mind. He’s so brilliantly drawn (and portrayed by Gary Oldman on TV) that you might imagine the entire series was built around him. However, it was River Cartwright – so named because Herron was travelling over a river while considering the character – who came first.

“Lamb was quite late in the process,” reveals the author. “There was the notion of an unpleasant boss, but that’s as far as it went. I built the story around the bunch of them, an ensemble piece. The characters only really started to develop once I started writing about them.

“The Zoe books had a certain amount of humour in them. Then when I started Slow Horses, I adopted a sort of cynical tone which seemed to fit. I threw in a few jokes, otherwise they’d just be books about really sad, miserable people who don’t earn enough money, and who wants to read that?

“I have lines that I keep in a file and I have a look to see if I can use them. I quite like jokes that a lot of readers might miss. Not because they’re not intelligent, but because their minds don’t plumb the depths like mine does.”

Mick Herron on stage in Harroagte with Saskia Reeves and Will Smith
image: Richard Maude

“I don’t have a plan”

A voracious reader, Herron thinks he may have subliminally got the initial idea from a very famous source – Len Deighton, of The Ipcress File fame, whose novels he re-read recently.

“I hadn’t read them since my teens, and I thought, ‘I stole a lot there, didn’t I?’” he smiles, with his tongue firmly in his cheek. “You know, sad people in an office and humour and all that…”

Another surprise is that despite knowing Lamb’s fate, and the direction the entire series will go, he doesn’t plan in detail very far ahead.

“I rarely know how a sentence is going to work out, never mind future books! I generally have a few destination points when I start writing, but I don’t have a plan. A death would be a destination point. But I don’t take killing characters off lightly because once they’re gone, I can never use them again.”

Herron loves the TV version, of which there will be a sixth and seventh season (beyond that, nobody’s telling): “The actors are capturing the essence of the characters; they’re slowly becoming them. A helluva lot of hard work has gone into those scripts. I’ve been so lucky having (showrunner) Will Smith working on them.”

As for the future, Herron has, sadly, no plans to bring the Slough House team north to Yorkshire, despite there being a perfect setting for spy shenanigans on Harrogate’s doorstep at RAF Menwith Hill, which provides intelligence and communications support to both the UK and US.

“I don’t like sending my characters far from home base because they’re not supposed to go anywhere,” he explains. “So I’d struggle to find a reason to send them to Harrogate, although it is, of course, a lovely place. I did send them to Wales once – it did not end well.”

Never mind. London and its environs have served the stories well so far – as evidenced by the fact a ninth novel, Clown Town, will be published in September. Unfortunately, that will be the last one for a while.

“I’m not working on a Slough House novel at the moment, but I’ve got some ideas…”

Here’s hoping they don’t involve the death of Jackson Lamb – we’re not ready to say goodbye just yet.

Top image: Gerard Binks Photography