Bad Actors
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Reading Tools
Mick Herron on Bad Actors
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Rubbing his hands at a rotten governmentHerron has spent most of the Slough House series keeping a deliberate distance from real politicians, building composites and archetypes. By the time he was writing Bad Actors, that professional remove had collapsed. The Johnson government had made fictional distance feel like a dishonesty.
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.
The anger wasn’t abstract. It had a specific target in what Herron wanted his spy fiction to be, and what he refused to let it become. The evil-mastermind tradition of the genre offered an easy out: a single bad actor with a plan, contained and defeatable. He rejected it.
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.
Peter Judd, the populist politician who maneuvers through Bad Actors, was drawn from a recognizable type rather than a single biography. Herron has explained why the type, not the man, is the real subject.
PJ was just my sort of rightwing bogeyman figure. Public-school educated, a sense of entitlement, self-obsession, complete disregard for ethics or morality or integrity. I mean, Boris Johnson fits that. But so do many other politicians.
How he wrote it
Twenty thousand words and a bent MacGuffinBad Actors contains a formal gamble that readers may not immediately notice: a sustained unbroken sequence of roughly 20,000 words. Herron set that challenge for himself not as an experiment in literary form but as a question about how much pressure a commercial thriller’s structure could absorb before it gave way.
within the confines of a perfectly ordinary thriller
He wanted to know whether the sustained stretch could be pulled off without breaking the genre’s implicit contract with readers who pick up a spy novel expecting pace.
The machinery of Bad Actors, a missing think-tank member, an activated surveillance protocol, a compromised First Desk, exists to solve a character problem rather than to generate suspense on its own. Herron has described his relationship to plot in terms that make clear where his real interest sits.
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.
The satirical edge in Bad Actors is sharper than in earlier books in the series, and Herron noticed the shift himself. Writing across nearly a decade of Slough House novels, he found that the political material had changed his sense of where the humor actually lives.
I used to think that the humor of the books largely resides in the characters and their reactions to situations, and in the dialogue, particularly when they’re squabbling. Lately, I’ve come to realize that there’s also humor, of a particularly grim nature, to be found in poking away at those scary sociopolitical matters you mention. This could be described as satire, if you’re feeling generous, though I’ve never been sure that laughing at the often ludicrous, frequently contemptible actions of those in power amounts to much more than spitting in the wind. Sooner this than go along with it, though.
Herron’s plotting method is essentially reactive: he watches the news, identifies the shape of a current dysfunction, and distorts it just enough to fit a thriller’s needs. The problem, he has found, is that reality keeps outrunning the distortion.
When plotting a novel, I simply look at what’s going on in the world and slightly bend it to my own use. And however dim a view I take, events generally conspire to make me think I should have bent it more.
What he wants us to sit with
Politicking, back rooms, and the only sane responseBad Actors is built around a government advisor who wants to bring MI5 under political control, using a disappearance as leverage over the intelligence service’s director. The plot is about a specific manipulation, but the argument underneath it is broader. Herron has drawn a careful line between the word he uses and the word he refuses.
I think a lot of what I’m writing about isn’t politics, it’s politicking. It’s the manner in which agendas are carried out. And I do think that regardless of who is in government, there’s going to be a secret element of power wielding.
The slow horses, the failed or sidelined MI5 officers exiled to Slough House, the series’ shabby Regent Street offshoot, are not in the books as symbols of romantic failure. They are there because institutions are made of people, and people bring everything with them. Herron has explained why that observation matters more to him than any conspiracy plot.
it doesn’t matter what the aims of any given organisation are, there are going to be people in those organisations. And, therefore, there will be any manner of petty jealousies, ambitions, spitefulness, kindness. The stuff that goes on in the back rooms.
Bad Actors was written in the aftermath of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic, in a Britain where the political absurdity Herron had been fictionalizing since the first Slough House novel had metastasized into something harder to metabolize. He had already worked out, three years before writing the book, what the only viable response was.
The more that politics come into these books, the more black humor there is: in 2019 that’s the only way — certainly in the UK and I suspect in America, too — the only way you can look at politics without going mad with despair.