As the first book in his spy series, Slow Horses, is made into a TV drama, Herron talks about his slow-burn success – and the resemblance of a certain blustering villain to our PM

Were it not for the packed bookshelves – everything from Len Deighton to the complete Philip Larkin – you could almost imagine the novelist Mick Herron’s flat as a safe house, plain and modest as it is, tucked away in a rather anonymous modern block in Oxford. The other immediate impression given by his home is of – how shall I put it? – antiquity. He’s still buying CDs (there’s a soaring Gavin Bryars choral work playing on the stereo) and at one point he produces his mobile, which, like the vast Toshiba laptop enthroned on a side table, seems suspiciously elderly. “It’s not a smartphone. I switch it on and it works. I don’t like having to learn new things, I’m too lazy,” he says. Before lockdown he had no wifi, either. “Obviously there are things I would need to check, and I would go out and do that.” At this point I look at him as if he’s just told me he gathers information by examining the entrails of birds. “In libraries,” he explains, gently.

He is clearly not lazy, not at all, about the stuff that matters to him. Herron is the author of the hugely entertaining Jackson Lamb series, about a stunningly inept collection of secret agents. These mess-ups and headcases have been banished from the sleek MI5 headquarters in Regent’s Park, London, to the secret service’s institutional oubliette Slough House, a grotty office block near the Barbican. Which is also the title of the seventh and latest novel in the series, published next month.

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