SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
"Slow Horses" has become a franchise - a TV series drawn from Mick Herron's novels that center on MI5 operatives who've bungled cases and are demoted to an espionage purgatory.
MICK HERRON: (Reading) Their careers are behind them, though not all have admitted it. Their triumphs are black laughter in the dark. Their duties involve the kind of paperwork designed to drive those undertaking it mad - paperwork with no clear objective and no end in sight, designed by someone who abandoned a course in labyrinth design in favor of something more uplifting, like illustrating suicide notes. To arrive here for work every morning is its own punishment, one made harsher by the awareness that it's self-inflicted.
SIMON: The ninth "Slow Horses" novel, "Clown Town." And Mick Herron joins us from the studios of the BBC in London. Thanks so much for being with us.
HERRON: I'm very glad to be here, Scott.
SIMON: This is your ninth book, to be released on 9/9. Do you expect us to believe that this is all a coincidence?
HERRON: Oh, gosh. Right. Yes, of course. It's being published on the 11 of September in this country, so that hadn't occurred to me. But, yeah, nine, nine, nine.
SIMON: Bet you think, those Americans'll never get that.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: I think we've cracked the case, whatever it is.
HERRON: I'll use that. I hadn't been aware of that.
SIMON: This story begins with a missing book. Or is it really?
HERRON: Well, that's certainly what it appears to be, yes. The character River Cartwright - his grandfather passed away some years ago now - has donated his grandfather's library to what I call the Spooks College in Oxford. And in the course of transporting this library from one place to another, it's discovered that one of the books, of which there is a sort of photographic record - there's a video film of the shelves of the old man's study - one of those books has gone missing. And River decides to find out where it went.
SIMON: What makes River Cartwright think it wasn't just, I don't know, a tourist guide to the Cotswolds or something?
HERRON: (Laughter) Well, River's at a bit of a loose end. He's recovering from an attack of Novichok poisoning that happened some books ago. He's not yet been reassigned to work. He's not yet been passed fit for duty. So he basically goes looking for something to fill his time, and this seems like as good a way as any.
SIMON: Your ninth "Slow Horses" novel - so many characters and ongoing plotlines to keep in your head over several novels. How do you do it?
HERRON: I'm not always entirely sure that I do get away with it. I treat each novel as an individual book, but you're right. Because there are recurring characters, and I don't sort of press a reset button at the beginning of every novel, these characters carry the weight of things that have happened to them in the past. So I do have to try and keep up with where they are, and I rely on memory and intuition. And every so often, I will, with a huge sigh of regret, go back to my bookshelves and look through the previous novels, just to make sure that I'm not making any massive continuity errors here and there.
SIMON: May I ask - have you been greatly influenced by writers generally regarded as masters of the genre? I'm thinking of Graham Greene or John le Carre.
HERRON: Both of them were people I read from an early age. I read both of them as a teenager, and I've continued to read them ever since. So, yes, I mean, I'm sure that their influence has leaked in, both of them. It's very difficult as a writer to discern one's own particular influences. That's something that readers spot, I think, more easily than writers do. But certainly, I'm following in the footsteps - a long way behind - of writers like Le Carre. And 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, yes.
SIMON: Yeah. May I ask, like them, if you've ever had an affiliation with MI5, or can you really tell us?
HERRON: You can certainly ask me. No, I never have. I never have. And they say, write what you know. Everybody is aware of that - the old mantra. But what I know is working in an office, and I simply transposed office life to the context of the espionage services. So I'm really writing about people working in offices.
SIMON: Course, I have to ask you about Jackson Lamb, the - if I may - disheveled leader of the Slow Horses.
HERRON: Disheveled is one of the nicer words that's said about him, to be honest, Scott.
SIMON: Well, I had - in the sentence that follows, I have cranky and odiferous.
HERRON: (Laughter) Yes, seems to suit him quite well.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SLOW HORSES")
GARY OLDMAN: (As Jackson Lamb) What, you would be doing the surveillance?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Yeah.
OLDMAN: (As Jackson Lamb, laughing).
SIMON: Gary Oldman does such a beautiful job...
HERRON: He does, doesn't he?
SIMON: ...Playing Jackson Lamb.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SLOW HORSES")
OLDMAN: (As Jackson Lamb) I am surrounded by [expletive] in this building, but you are the gold standard of [expletive]. So when you wonder why I have you going through the rubbish of a disgraced right-wing journo, wonder no more. It's because I don't like you.
SIMON: Do readers and viewers begin to think they know him better than you do?
HERRON: I think readers always have the right to think they - that they know a character better than their author does because they do roughly half of the work. And I know this because I'm a reader myself before I'm a writer. When I'm reading somebody else's book, I'm bringing an awful lot of my own experiences and imagination to the page to flesh out, you know, what I think the characters might look like and so on. There are as many versions of any given character in a book as there are readers of that book. Of course, now we have Gary doing his version of Lamb on screen. And Gary has, you know, more right than most people to decide what Lamb is really like because he's devoted more of his time and energy and imagination to being Lamb than anybody but - bar me, I guess.
SIMON: Does the fact that the cast of characters who are the Slow Horses often feel cast aside make them, in a sense, sharper investigators of human frailty?
HERRON: I'm not sure that that's the case. I think that...
SIMON: You've destroyed my entire premise, but go ahead.
HERRON: (Laughter) I think you'd have to be quite self-aware to have that kind of insight into other people's failings, as they, you know, reflect your own. I don't think that my characters, on the whole, are blessed with that kind of insight.
SIMON: Why write about a group of spies who are, I don't know, considered misfits and even failures as opposed to, I don't know, James Bond?
HERRON: 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. I mean, I don't - you know, I don't see myself as being a thwarted failure who's miserable with his lot, but I have a great deal of sympathy for those who do. I think readers do, too. I mean, maybe it's an English thing, rooting for the underdog. But I think readers find it easier to empathize with people whom they might recognize on the page, reading about characters who haven't, you know - aren't leading an enviable life, if you like, and who are suffering what readers might recognize as the same sort of problems they have. You know, like, waiting for buses in the rain and that sort of thing - the bits of life that we all share.
SIMON: Mick Herron - his latest novel, "Clown Town." Thank you so much for being with us.
HERRON: I really enjoyed talking to you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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