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.
What led you to write an espionage series?
I’d read a fair amount of spy fiction but hadn’t written any, largely because I felt there was no point, not having the knowledge of actually having worked in that area. When I decided I could write about people who were [themselves] barred from a greater knowledge [of espionage], I realised it was a way into the genre. The whole premise of the series is that they’re not allowed to do anything; I’m basically writing about people being in an office. It was making a virtue of limitations, really. A surprising number of readers say: “Oh, I used to work in that world and it’s quite realistic”, which I suspect isn’t entirely the truth, but probably everybody working in any kind of organisation has that experience of middle management and things going wrong.
The massive success of the series, after your original publisher dropped it, must feel pretty vindicating.
I suppose I have my moments. I know I’ve been extremely lucky, but one of the ways I’ve been lucky, counterintuitively, is that it was an awful long time before I gained any kind of readership. If it had been immediate, I probably wouldn’t be on an even keel now. I was already established in what I was doing; success has given me freedom to write full time, but the problems and joys of sitting down to get on with the work remain the same. If success had been the prime objective, I’d probably have given up when Slow Horses didn’t do anything. I mean, it wasn’t a success then [in 2010]. It is now. But it’s the same book. So I tend not to pay too much attention.
For a novel written in 2008, when Labour were still in power, it was startlingly prescient, from Brexit to the rise of Boris Johnson.
I was conjuring worst-case scenarios and made some lucky stabs in the dark. I’ve been drawn to politics as a backdrop because it seems to go hand in hand with the kind of espionage thriller I’m interested in. I don’t want to write a big, plotted, evil-mastermind spy novel; I’m interested in incompetence, things going wrong, badly motivated stuff, and that’s essentially our political reality now. It gives me plenty of scope, but I don’t feel good about it. We have a prime minister who acts with the worst possible intentions because he’s only interested in himself. As a citizen, I deplore it; as a writer, I’m rubbing my hands.
Do readers tell you how they think the series should develop?
A fair bit, yeah. I’m always delighted, because it shows the books have a life, but some kind of imp of the perverse inside me means that when somebody says, please don’t kill [such-and-such], I think, oh, that’s what I’ll do then. I don’t take it lightly; I do feel sad about killing off characters, not because I feel they’re real, but because they each offer an individual outlook and if I kill one off, I can’t access that voice any more, which limits me. My plots are essentially a MacGuffin to give them all something to do – they can’t just sit and snark at each other all day, which is the bit I really like writing.
Where do you write?
I have an apartment I go to Monday to Friday, nine to five. It’s fairly private, with no internet, so there’s no distractions unless there’s a cricket match and I’m listening to the radio. When I’m working in an environment that does have wifi, half the time I’m looking at emails like everyone else, seeing what’s happened in the wider world, looking at book reviews, that kind of thing. In my own space, it’s not like I’m working constantly, but I am thinking constantly about the book, even though I’m padding around the room, having a lie down, whatever.
What have you been reading lately?
Derek Mahon’s collected poems [The Poems (1961-2020)], which he established just before he died. It’s everything he wanted preserved in one volume; he was tinkering with early poems right at the end of his life. I still read a lot of poetry and I like to reach for quotations when I’m writing; I don’t go rooting around, it just comes out from the rag-and-bone shop of the mind after reading for so many years.
What first made you want to write?
I just always felt that I was a writer and that’s always what I wanted to be. I wrote stories at school and verse for quite a long time after college. I suppose it’s escape. I had a very happy childhood in a big family, we all get on very well and it was lovely, but I am by nature an introvert and I need to spend a certain amount of time sitting at a table with a book. That’s what I did when I was small.
What did you read as a child?
Everything I could lay my hands on; quantity makes the difference rather than quality when you’re young. I graduated to adult fiction reasonably early, sort of from Enid Blyton to Agatha Christie, who was, as for thousands of people, the bridge. As a child, I loved The Wind in the Willows and would read it over and over again. I reread it a couple of years ago. It’s not just talking badgers; so much of it is about home – the homes you leave behind, the ones you yearn for. Ratty’s thinking about joining a ship and travelling the world, aching to be away, then aching to be back again, and of course [Toad has his] home taken over by a load of stoats and weasels. Reading it as an adult, I feel a deep response to the urges I see in that book. The idea of a writing place of my own where I can go, where nobody else is… the seeds were probably planted back then without my realising.
Slough House is published by John Murray (£8.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Bad Actors is published by Baskerville (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
