MISSION IMPROBABLE

It's been a long route to the top for Mick Herron, but the slog has made him a great writer of failure, says Katie Rosseinsky, ahead of the release of 'Down Cemetery Road' to Apple TV+

- Katie Rosseinsky

When Mick Herron presented the manuscript for Dead Lions, the second novel in his Slough House espionage series, to his then-publisher, some time in the early 2010s, their response was a resounding “no”. Slow Horses, his first book about the curmudgeonly, indefatigably flatulent spy Jackson Lamb and his motley crew of washed-up fellow operatives, had sold badly, and the company wasn't about to take a chance on another potential flop.

Fast-forward a decade and a half or so, and Herron's own story has enjoyed a series of remarkable plot twists and turnarounds (ones that he would probably reject as too fanciful). His books have sold millions of copies around the world, and garnered comparisons to John le Carré, the master of the modern spy novel; in 2022, a New Yorker headline asked if Herron was “the best spy novelist of his generation”. The past month or so alone has seen the release of Clown Town, his ninth Slough House book, and the launch of the fifth season of Slow Horses, the Emmy-winning TV adaptation starring Gary Oldman as Lamb; the sixth series is already in the can, and production is about to begin on the seventh.

And this week, a new series, Down Cemetery Road, based on Herron's debut novel and starring two acting powerhouses in Ruth Wilson and Emma Thompson, will debut on Apple TV+. It shares plenty of the same storytelling DNA with the Slow Horses saga - clever tonal shifts between light and dark, an eye for institutional cover-ups, outsiders taking matters into their own slightly amateurish hands - but has a style and a spikiness all of its own. It's guaranteed to appeal to fans of Lamb and co, and also cements Herron's position as prestige TV's most in-demand author.