A profile of Mick Herron, author of the “Slow Horses” spy novel series. “I was only ever a hair’s breadth away from being exactly as much of a failure as the people I write about.”
Herron’s characters are bad spies and MI5 screw-ups exiled to a stable of misfits called Slough House, where they are desperate to escape life as so-called slow horses.
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When they were first published, his books were read by roughly the same number of people as his articles for a trade journal on U.K. employment law.
“I wrote about people who were having a bad time at work, essentially,” said Herron, who was an editor at the Employment Law Brief. “And yes, you can certainly draw a lot of conclusions about how that influenced the books that I started writing when I was working there.”
Back then, he was commuting every day from Oxford to London. He came to work early so he could leave early. When he got home around 6 p.m., he had the energy to write for an hour. By aiming for 350 words a night, he pumped out five well-reviewed detective novels. But they “hadn’t set the world alight,” as he puts it, and they weren’t nearly successful enough for him to write full time. So he kept commuting.
When he started his job, Herron had an office on a floor with only a few people. By the time he left 15 years later, he was reserving a different hot desk every day on a floor with a few hundred people. Which taught him a valuable lesson that would animate his spy fiction.
“The larger the organization was that I worked for,” he said, “the less concern it had for the people working for it.”
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His literary interests shifted after July 7, 2005, when being in London for the suicide bombings made him want to write about the security services. The problem was that he knew precisely nothing about the security services. What he did know was that the bigger an organization gets, the more dysfunctional it becomes.
“This was a truth that surely applied as much to the intelligence services as to any other place of work,” Herron later wrote. “And if every organization has its failures—its second-raters—wouldn’t that be well inside my comfort zone?”
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[Herron’s success after years of struggling] was so improbable and wildly unexpected that when other writers ask him for advice, he offers two words.
“Be lucky,” he says. “You can have everything else going for you. But without a stroke of luck along the way, you might never really make it.”
— “Nobody Was Reading Him. Now He’s the World’s Best Spy Writer. By Ben Cohen at The Guardian
