Mick Herron's Books | Crime Books

Biography

Born in 1963 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Mick Herron studied English at Balliol College, University of Oxford. Then it was a hop and a skip into a job as a sub-editor at a legal journal near the Barbican in London. Herron decided to stay in Oxford and face the daily commute into the city, about an hour and a half each way. That could have been the start of an ordinary but uninspiring career. Fortunately, Mick Herron wanted to write a book and realised that the only way to do that was to make a start.

“… if I wanted to be a writer, I had to actually do the writing. Seems obvious, but it was a pivotal moment. I remember the room I was sitting in, the view through the window, the boring job I’d just arrived home from …” (Harrogate International Festivals)

A Personal Challenge

He set himself the challenge of writing 350 words a day and, in 2003, published his first book, Down Cemetery Road. He wrote four novels about the fictional Oxford private detective Zoë Boehm. They culminated, six years later, in Smoke and Whispers when her body was pulled out of the River Tyne in Herron’s hometown.

Terrorist Attacks

Oddly, the cause of Zoë’s untimely literary demise may well have been the suicide bombings in London in 2005. Four terrorists blew up three underground trains and a bus, killing 52 people and injuring hundreds more. This tragedy diverted Herron’s attention away from his Oxford private detective.

“The idea of a terrorist event as an intrusion on ordinary life, on everyday life, that became something I wanted to write about.” (The Independent)

Instead, Herron started to write about political events, using the secret services as a vehicle. Herron based his novels in Slough House, an office building where MI5 puts its rejects out to seed in the hope that they will quit. Doing so avoids putting Her Majesty’s Government through a distasteful and embarrassing industrial tribunal. The cherry on Herron’s cake was his appointment of Jackson Lamb as the office’s departmental head. This man makes David Brent look like Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the Russian Federation.

Political Incorrectness

The series gave Herron carte blanche to provide his satirical take on current world events. In it, he mixes not-so-unfamiliar characters and events, from plane-born terrorist attacks to corrupt politicians.

Fluffy-haired and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations – Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh, my giddy aunt!!! – Peter Judd has long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the Great British Public, which thought him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids’ nanny, robbing the taxman blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. (‘Damn fine city,’ he’d remarked on a trip to Paris. ‘Probably worth defending next time.’) Not everyone who’d worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who’d witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large, PJ seemed happy with the image he’d either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and bicycle.
Slow Horses

If the fictional P.J. and real-life B.J. are cut from the same cloth, Herron doesn’t appear too embarrassed. Herron was at Balliol College at the same time as Boris Johnson, though their relationship was fleeting.

“I saw him once or twice in the junior common room. I wasn’t mixing in that kind of circle… I don’t think the Bullingdon Club opened its arms to northern comprehensive types.” (The Guardian)

A Slow Start

The Slough House series was not an instant success. The company that published Slow Horses in 2010 declined to publish the second novel in the series due to poor sales. That second novel, Dead Lions, was originally only published in the U.S., so it was an eye-opener when it won the 2013 Crime Writer’s Association Gold Dagger Award. An editor at John Murray Press picked up a copy of Slow Horses at Liverpool Street Station and, in 2015, republished both it and Dead Lions in the U.K. They sank without trace, but John Murray gave them a second push. In 2017 Waterstones Booksellers named Slow Horses its thriller of the month, seven years after it was first published. Fourteen years after his first novel, Herron finally gave up his intercity commute.

The Spymaster

Critics liken Mick Herron’s books to those of the other masters of British espionage writing; John LeCarre, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming. When asked where he got his knowledge of spycraft, he admits that he has made it all up, though it is clear that his time as a wage slave helped. He has a firm grasp of the corporate psyche, structure, and jargon. Slough House revolves around dogs (investigators), dentists (interrogators) and weasels (analysts). Alongside Andy McNab, he also understands the corporate fondness for acronyms; Herron’s are less plausible but funnier.

… in the end, the assault charges had been sidestepped on condition Shirley sign up for AFM. Anger Fucking Management. Twice a week, in Shoreditch.
Spook Street

The Bureaucrat

Mick Herron, like Hideo Yokoyama, has a profound understanding of how people operate in large organisations. There the similarity ends, as Herron overlays his fictional office with a deadpan sense of humour.

“When imagining how an intelligence service might operate, I simply bear in mind that the corporate mindset is naturally Machiavellian, then aim for an extra layer or two of deviousness.” (Publisher’s Weekly)