Slow Horses
Slow Horses
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Mick Herron on Slow Horses
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A grim building and a nearby bombThe premise began as a deliberate inversion of the most repeated piece of writing advice, arrived at from a very specific desk: Herron was copy-editing employment discrimination case reports, reading daily about people pushed out of organizations, when the concept clicked into place.
People say write what you know. So I wrote about people who are failures.
The physical setting preceded the plot by years. Herron walked past a derelict building on Aldersgate Street every morning on his way to work, long before he had any intention of writing about it. That building is now the actual set used in the Apple TV series.
I didn’t know I was going to write a book, let alone a series of books about it.
The decisive push from detective fiction into espionage came on 7 July 2005. Herron was at Paddington station when the Edgware Road bomb went off one stop away. His assumption had been that a terrorism thriller demanded a protagonist with specialist knowledge of how attacks are planned and prevented. Standing among ordinary bystanders that morning dismantled that assumption and gave Slough House, a posting that reduces MI5 officers to the same bystander condition, its real logic.
I’m extremely aware that I’m not competent to write about global issues. But one of the things I took from 7/7 is that you don’t have to be an expert to be implicated. We’re all implicated.
Beyond terrorism, Herron needed room that detective fiction had never given him. His Oxford series had followed one or two characters through largely domestic crimes. The spy world offered an ensemble and a way into political rather than personal disorder.
The realization that the secret service is, in fact, a very large organization, that was perhaps a trigger for everything that followed: I could treat the world of spying just like any other world, where people are often doing quite dull jobs and working with other people who they don’t necessarily like, with a lot of office politics going on. There’s no reason why the secret service should be immune to that.
How he wrote it
Three hundred and fifty words a night, characters invented on the pageHerron wrote the novel without knowing it would become a series. He built no architecture beyond the single book, and he nearly closed off any sequel by destroying Slough House entirely at the end. The abandoned finale he described in a 2025 Guardian interview would have left Jackson Lamb and his administrator Diana Standish as the sole survivors, escaping together on a ferry.
Much of what I did in that book was sort of accidental, you know? It felt like a good idea at the time, but it wasn’t the basis for a series — I was simply writing that one book. It was only when I’d finished it that I thought, ‘Actually, there’s something here that I could continue.’
Jackson Lamb, the dissolute, strategically offensive handler who runs Slough House, came within a chapter of never appearing in the novel at all. In a Waterstones video interview, Herron described the long uncertainty over whether Lamb should exist only as hearsay, a figure the other characters referenced but the reader never met directly.
for a while, when I was planning the first book, I hadn’t been entirely sure that he [Lamb] was going to appear in person. I thought he’d be someone that all the other characters would talk about, but he wouldn’t actually be there on the page. [paraphrased from audio]
Herron had avoided spy fiction for years because he assumed it required insider knowledge he did not have. The solution was to make his characters equally excluded: officers who have been barred from the classified world they once inhabited. That exclusion, rather than any research, became his way in.
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 characters resisted conventional planning. Herron tried the standard preparation, writing short biographies for each slow horse before drafting, but found the exercise produced material he could not use. The characters only became real once they were in scenes together.
I did write little paragraphs about each of the characters, trying to build backstories, a bit of biography, but it largely felt fake.
The entire novel was composed in daily sessions of roughly 350 words, fitted into the hour after his commute from London. He used the train for thinking; the desk at home for prose. The method was slow enough that he had to believe in the book before he could finish it, with no guarantee that anyone would publish it.
On what’s at stake
Office politics as the shape of national failureWhen the Apple TV series brought sudden attention to a novel published in 2010, readers and journalists asked Herron how he had predicted the rise of organized far-right violence in Britain. Publishers at the time had considered that plot strand implausible. Herron did not.
Horrified, but not surprised. I didn’t think the plot of Slow Horses too unexpected; it seemed to me a logical progression from where we were at the time. While I was writing that novel, the world was still clawing its way through the economic meltdown of 2008. Such times always result in the eruption of the usual hatreds.
As the Slough House books moved deeper into British political dysfunction, Herron found that darker material demanded a corresponding tonal adjustment. The black humor in the later novels is not a relief valve but a formal response to subject matter that he regards as genuinely threatening.
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.
Beneath the espionage plotting, Herron has been consistent that the emotional register he is after is workplace recognition, not thriller excitement. The slow horses’ tea-bag arguments and passive aggression are designed to feel familiar to anyone who has sat in an organization they cannot escape.
I simply transposed office life to the context of the espionage services. So I’m really writing about people working in offices.
What he wants us to sit with
Implicated without expertise, stuck without exitThe novel’s plot, a young British Muslim kidnapped and threatened with execution by a far-right cell while MI5 watches and does almost nothing, turns on the question of who gets to act in a crisis. The slow horses are not involved because they have special abilities. They are involved because they are the only people present. That condition, Herron has argued, is not specific to spies.
I’m extremely aware that I’m not competent to write about global issues. But one of the things I took from 7/7 is that you don’t have to be an expert to be implicated. We’re all implicated.
The near-ending he chose not to write clarifies what the series is actually protecting. Destroying Slough House would have been a clean, ironic finish, consistent with the cynicism the books trade in. Keeping it intact, letting these failed officers remain in their broken-down building near the Barbican, was the more uncomfortable choice.
That didn’t happen. It would have been a good ending, actually. But my life would be very different.