Clown Town
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Mick Herron on Clown Town
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Good intentions, monstrous outcomesThe real-world seed for the Brains Trust, the retired intelligence handlers at the center of the novel, was Freddie Scappaticci, publicly identified as Stakeknife, the British intelligence asset embedded in the IRA who was himself responsible for murders and torture. Herron landed on the man in a single phrase, and stopped there.
An appalling human being.
That compressed verdict is the moral weight the whole novel is built to carry. Herron wasn’t interested in reconstructing the operation; he was interested in what it cost the officers who ran it.
The question Herron wanted to answer wasn’t what the Stakeknife operation did to its victims. It was what it did to the officers who believed, when they signed up, that their work would prevent harm. The Brains Trust are not villains. That’s what makes them difficult.
I was interested in writing about people who intended to do good. They joined the intelligence services to protect their communities and to prevent harm from happening. And it turned out that in this particular instance, the operation they were involved in, involved protecting an asset of the intelligence services who was himself a murderer, a torturer, a monstrous individual, essentially. [paraphrased from audio — Barnes & Noble interview with Juliet Grames]
Beyond the Brains Trust, the book opens on a newly elected British government finding its footing, unnamed but recognizable. Herron uses that opening not to score a political point but to reset the novel’s recurring argument: it makes no difference who wins.
I’m writing about how power corrupts. It’s hardly an original observation, but it doesn’t matter who’s in power. Things are going to go wrong, either wilfully or by cock-up. I’m more prone towards the cock-up view of history than I am conspiracy, but that doesn’t alter the effect.
One strand of the plot had been waiting since the first Slough House novel. In that book, River Cartwright briefly films his grandfather’s library on his phone. Herron placed that image knowing it would matter eventually, though he had no fixed plan for how. The missing book that sets everything in motion in Clown Town traces directly back to those few seconds of footage.
I knew when I did that, that that was going to come back and I was going to use that in some way. I didn’t know how, but I knew I was going to use that. And I was also offering it up as a clue. [paraphrased from audio — Waterstones interview]
How he wrote it
No diagrams, six attempts at one chapterWhen Scappaticci died in 2023, while Herron was drafting Clown Town, the resulting press coverage and podcast series offered a ready supply of operational detail. He made a deliberate choice to ignore all of it. His wider position on research hasn’t varied across nine books.
It hampers the imagination. Also, I’m quite lazy when it comes to research.
He works without a detailed outline, calling himself a pantser: a destination in mind, some fixed stops along the way, the rest discovered in the writing. That method produced one passage in Clown Town that resisted him longer than anything else in the book. Near the end, several characters converge on the same building from different directions, each arriving by a different route, each encountering the others in sequence. Getting those movements to cohere took repeated attempts rather than advance planning.
I must have written that chapter five or six times. I would get a little way into it and I had to stop and start again. There’s a lot of choreography involved in it. It involves quite a lot of characters all converging in the same place and in and out of the same building, all coming in by different routes and meeting each other in different ways. [paraphrased from audio — Barnes & Noble interview with Juliet Grames]
Herron has described his daily output as around 500 words on a productive day, with much of the remaining working time spent thinking rather than typing. The comment below reflects something he returned to in multiple conversations: that the visible part of writing is the smaller part.
The actual putting down of words is almost a kind of admin task after a while. [paraphrased from audio — Barnes & Noble interview with Juliet Grames]
Herron only understood what Clown Town had done to the series after he finished it. Character arcs he had been tracking across multiple books reached conclusions he hadn’t consciously aimed for. The book’s function within the sequence revealed itself in retrospect.
I think now looking at it, Clown Town is quite a transitional novel. But I didn’t set out to write a transitional novel, but that’s what has happened. [paraphrased from audio — Barnes & Noble interview with Juliet Grames]
One of those arcs is Louisa Guy’s. After losing her partner in Dead Lions and a close friend in Joe Country, she carries accumulated grief into Clown Town and, for the first time in the series, seriously considers walking away. Herron said she is almost alone among the slow horses in having reached that point.
The structural glue holding the book together is not plot but pattern. Herron has spoken about this craft principle across several interviews, and it underpins the way Clown Town weaves its three plotlines without a single overarching conspiracy to unify them.
Thematic patterning acts as a kind of narrative glue, and I’d find it difficult to construct a novel without some underlying theme to it, even if one that never becomes obvious to the reader.
What he wants us to sit with
Anguish under the jokesThe Brains Trust storyline is designed to produce a discomfort that the novel doesn’t resolve. These are characters who joined the intelligence services in good faith and spent the central years of their careers protecting someone genuinely terrible. Herron frames the question they are left with in plain terms.
If the main aspect of their professional life, which is supposed to be one of integrity and principle, was protecting this monster, how would they feel about it? [paraphrased from audio — Barnes & Noble interview with Juliet Grames]
The slow horses of Slough House are not spies to admire. They are people who have failed at something and been shelved. Herron has consistently said that this is precisely why he writes them, and the comment below explains what he wants readers to take from that choice.
I think I’d get quite bored writing simply about heroes and heroism and people who are high-achieving. I don’t connect with that, particularly.
Asked about the authors who shaped his sensibility, Herron named Graham Greene and John le Carré, but not for their plotting or their tradecraft. What he took from Greene runs directly through Clown Town, which ends with real losses and genuine uncertainty about whether Slough House survives in its current form.
A lot of what Greene wrote about is the anguish, if you like, of his characters. That’s the sort of thing that interests me, too.