Mick Herron’s career sounds like a classic redemption story: Years of hard work, a bruising setback, and then, finally, success with his Slough House spy novels.

Yes, that’s what it sounds like – just not to him.

“I feel a kind of separation between myself as a person and as an author. I can see that this author’s story is unusual, and I’m very happy if people find good things to take away from it. But for me,” Herron says, “I was never particularly downhearted. I was certainly never depressed or felt like I was wasting my time writing because I’ve always written for myself, first and foremost. It’s what I do.”

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As the story goes, Herron was in London during the 7/7 terrorist attack in 2005 that killed 56 and wounded hundreds, an experience that led him to switch from writing detective fiction to spy novels. After the first novel in his spy series, “Slow Horses,” failed to catch on, his British publisher dropped him. But New York-based Soho Press backed the series, word of mouth spread and Herron’s work began to grow in popularity, so much so that a well-regarded series based on the books is now in its second season on Apple TV+ and Herron was just profiled in the New Yorker under the headline, “Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?”

Herron, who spoke via Zoom while in New York at the Soho Press offices (and to catch jazz musician Christian McBride’s Inside Straight at the Village Vanguard), cautions against making too much of this bullet-point version of his life.

Mick Herron’s Slough House novels. (Courtesy of Soho Press)

“I wouldn’t want to overplay that; it’s something that people really seize on – it was part of a long process,” he says while admitting that something did shift in his writing. “Before, I always felt that I was not equipped to write about large-scale events, you know, terrorism.

“But I realized that, in fact, we’re all qualified to write about certain things because it can happen anywhere at any time; we’re all involved, like it or not. So it’s a perfectly valid viewpoint to write about these huge events just from the point of view of somebody who doesn’t necessarily know very much about why they’re happening – but the fact they are happening is all-encompassing.”

Compelling and often hilarious, the Slough House novels, of which there are currently eight as well as the recently published “Standing by the Wall: The Collected Slough House Novellas,” concern a low-level British MI5 outpost. Housed in a decrepit London building known as Slough House, it’s staffed with screwups, incompetents and – possibly – a few solid, underappreciated agents.

“I’m perfectly happy to defend the underappreciated, but I’m mostly defending the incompetent. I will defend the failures – because we all are,” says Herron, who recalls being told early on his characters were unlikeable. “I found that quite odd. Who wants to write about flawless people? I don’t know any. I’m not one.”

Heading Slough House is Jackson Lamb, a delightfully unpleasant leader known for his questionable hygiene and foul temper as well as an incredible ability to remain employed. Why Lamb, who was once a top agent, is still on the job is a subject of speculation in the series, but the only thing he likes less than his own team is everything and everyone else. A great character on the page, he’s also played memorably by Gary Oldman in the Apple TV+ series.

“My sympathies are for those who make bad decisions and have to suffer the consequences,” Herron says of the Slough House team. “Those of us who are living very privileged lives generally have the luxury of not being made to pay for our mistakes in the way that people who aren’t as lucky have. Because we all make errors all the time. So, yes, my heart is with those who struggle.”

While “those who struggle” could be the motto of the Slough House team, Herron himself is on a successful run. The books are bestsellers, the audiobooks are terrific (and Herron was preparing to meet his U.S. audiobook narrator Gerard Doyle a few days after we spoke) and the Apple TV+ series, which features Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, Saskia Reeves and more alongside Oldman, is excellent and a lot of fun.

Gary Oldman in “Slow Horses” on Apple TV+ (Courtesy of Apple TV+ /ATV)

The author quietly deflects this praise to others, both to his audiobook narrators and then to the team producing the TV show, who he says deserve all the credit.

“I accept the congratulations for it while feeling like I’ve done very little to earn it because it’s the writing team and the directors and the cast who all have done amazingly well with that show,” says Herron. “They wanted the book on the screen, and they stuck with that all the way through despite the fact that there must have been many pressures at different times to encourage them to do otherwise.

“There were many ways in which they could have just said OK, now we’ll drop the jokes or we’ll make the characters nicer to each other, but they stuck to their guns all the way through, which is great. I mean, I’m very, very glad they did that.”

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As for Herron, who lives in Oxford, plans to return home and get back to work, writing in an apartment with no Wi-Fi and carrying a flip phone to reduce distractions. It’s a practice he began years ago when he wrote at night after working his day job.

“For me, the important thing is getting up and carrying on with the writing. The book I’m writing now is all that matters to me ​–​ more than anything else, anything that’s happened in the past,” he says.

“And I hope that continues. Because if that stops, something’s gone wrong.”

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