“If I had ever known, or worked with, anyone like Jackson Lamb, I’d have spent more time in therapy than at my laptop this last decade and a half.”

Mick Herron’s Horse Sense

The Slow Horses author on the inspiration for Jackson Lamb, taking a page out of Stephen King’s book, and what his third act would look like

By Jim Kelly

Pity the British publisher who first published Slow Horses in 2010. Sales disappointed the company, so they passed on Dead Horses, the second volume in the Slough House series, which features Jackson Lamb and his not-so-merry band of British-intelligence misfits. Soho Press picked it up, and then Apple TV+ came along with their show starring Gary Oldman, and Mick Herron now has more accolades than Lamb has bouts of intestinal gas. His latest novel is Clown Town, and Season Five of Slow Horses begins later this month. And since we can never have too much Herron, Down Cemetery Road, featuring his detective Zoë Boehm and starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, arrives on Apple TV+ in late October.

JIM KELLY: It’s always a challenge to interview spy novelists about their upcoming book, lest I let slip a spoiler. Each of your nine books relies on a beehive of sorts—right-wing crazies, the C.I.A., Russia, North Korea—that the action buzzes around, and in this case you find your beehive in the era of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Why did you choose that period?