Fat, filthy, foul-mouthed and flatulent: Here comes TV’s latest anti-hero

Mick Herron knows the risks novelists face in allowing their work to be adapted for the small screen.

“There’s a danger when the demands of television meet the idiosyncrasies of a novel the demands of TV often win out. We can all think of books we love that are quirky and original, occupying a morally grey area that turn out in TV versions to be anodyne, banal Sunday evening entertainment.”

Mick Herron says the casting of Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb felt as if the universe was doing him a huge favour.Credit: Alamy

But that’s not what’s happened, Herron says, in the case of his novel Slow Horses, which has been turned into a six-part series by production house See-Saw, responsible most recently for the garlanded Jane Campion film, The Power of the Dog.

“The reason we went with them was they were very keen on preserving the book and keeping the tone and characters on the screen,” he says from his home in Oxford.

Herron has written seven novels about his “slow horses”, a group of British intelligence agents banished to the outlying, decrepit Slough House – near London’s Barbican rather than the town of Slough where David Brent roamed and Betjeman called for bombs to fall – for various offences that have irritated the authorities at the service’s Regent’s Park headquarters.

Ruling the shabby roost is Jackson Lamb, a former “joe” in the field who is fat, filthy, foul-mouthed, and flatulent. He has the impressive ability to conjure a cigarette out of the ether and the mysterious capacity to ascend the groaning Slough House stairs without alerting anyone and suddenly materialise in their presence.

George Smiley he is not. But the series does have one thing in common with John le Carre’s spymaster: Gary Oldman. The man who portrayed Smiley in Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (and reported to be going to reprise the role for television) is back in the world of spies as Lamb.

“[Gary Oldman] does it delightfully because he manages both the kind of seediness and sordid nature of Jackson’s immediate personality.”

Mick Herron

You don’t have to be in the intelligence services to detect Herron’s excitement about the casting, which also includes Kristin Scott Thomas as the frosty, scheming Diana “Lady Di” Taverner, second in charge at the Park, Jack Lowden and Saskia Reeves as slow horses River Cartwright and Catherine Standish, and Jonathan Pryce as Cartwright’s grandfather.

“It felt like the universe was doing me a huge favour,” Herron says. His assessment is that Oldman occupies the character to the full and has fun doing it: “He does it delightfully because he manages both the kind of seediness and sordid nature of Jackson’s immediate personality. He can do all the depths of the character and show the dangerousness underneath.”

Herron has been a le Carre enthusiast since he was a schoolboy in Newcastle upon Tyne in the late 1970s. In an article for The Times Literary Supplement in November 2019 he wrote “that how le Carre wrote feels just right to me; feels like how a spy novel should be written. The shadow he threw on the genre is matched by the light he cast, and, while there will always be other espionage novelists, the degree to which I admire them depends on how much they invoke the feelings I had on encountering his work.”

Nevertheless, he’s not sure le Carre would approve of his books.

“I suspect he might have thought that I was a bit facetious for his tastes. Our approaches to the subject are very different. He had a high sense of the moral responsibility, both of the writer and the subject he was writing about,” he says.

“He became very angry about many things, as we know from reading the books. I’m angry too about various things, but my anger takes a different outlet and I use satire in a way that le Carre didn’t. His books were not without wit and humour, but I think he had a high seriousness that would have found what I do not quite right.”

Le Carre used to say that after the BBC adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy he would always see Alec Guinness as Smiley in his creative imagination. Guinness had become, in effect, the voice of Smiley. Would Herron experience something similar when next he came to write Lamb?

Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb and Jack Lowden as River Cartwright in Slow Horses.Credit: Apple TV+

“I honestly don’t think so. I do regard the TV version and everything around it as being something separate from what I do. It’s always been the case that when I’m working, all the context of that work, all the other bits and pieces around the writer’s life, they disappear. All that matters is putting the words on the page and my imagination has never been particularly visual. It’s the words that matter to me. I’ve got Jackson’s voice in my head and I’m hoping that is pretty much how it will stay.”

That’s not say, however, that there aren’t adjustments made to the characters in the screen version. Take Peter Judd, the ambitious politician who is described by Herron in Slow Horses as “a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle” and in the sixth novel, Joe Country, as “the one-time scourge of the liberal left, with a personal life not so much lock-up-your-daughters as scorch your earth and erect watchtowers”.

The reader inevitably thinks of the current tenant of 10 Downing Street, but Herron cautions that when it comes to doing an adaptation, there is a danger in making it too much of a cartoon.

“There’s always going to be a certain gap between the picture you have in your head or the picture you take away from the page and the one that is put on the screen. I think that gap is very small throughout the whole series.”

Herron didn’t adapt the books – Will Smith is lead writer – but did spend time in the writers’ room discussing plot points and difficulties that arose. “They started with a blank white board and ended up with a scene-by-scene breakdown of the whole six episodes.”

Herron’s mother was a teacher and had him reading before he went to school. He studied English at Oxford University. He began his writing life with poetry, which he regards as the highest literary calling, and turned to prose only when the poems dried up. There are consolations: “It’s an enormous help with prose because word choice and rhythm are equally crucial to prose but less obviously so.”

He was working as a sub-editor on a legal publication and would walk past the building that became Slough House each day on his way to the office. (He is particularly impressed that See-Saw managed to get permission to use the outside of the building in Aldersgate Street: “It’s precisely the place that in my imagination I situated the department.” )

His first series featured an Oxford-based private eye, Zoe Boehm, but the spies began with Slow Horses, which was published in 2010. It was not intended to be a series: “My original plan,” he told me a few years ago, “was that the ending would be very different, and it would pretty well have closed down any possibility of a sequel.”

Success was by no means instant. He was, he says, an unnoticed writer for a long time so was grounded enough when it came along. But it did mean he could leave his job and write full time, which he has done for about six years.

“Mostly what pleases me is when readers tell me I’ve given them pleasure because I’ve felt that way so often. I’m a reader before I’m a writer and the joy that writers have given me is a very real and tangible thing in my life, so to feel that I’ve had anything like that role in anyone’s life is great.”

Later this year, Dead Lions, the second Slough House novel, will stream. The two were filmed at the same time. “It’s quite a strange way they’re doing it. They call it season one and it is, in fact, Slow Horses and Dead Lions, which is currently being edited.”

And will there be more?

“I don’t think I’m allowed to say anything about season two, but we’re all very cheerful over here.”

Slow Horses streams on Apple TV. The eighth Slow Horses book, Bad Actors, will be published by John Murray in May.

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