Should a 'Lambism' pops into your head, make sure you have a notebook to hand so you can jot it down. That’s what Slow Horses author Mick Herron does, he told Oliver Callan, having learned the hard way and lost so many ‘Lambisms’ along the way. The (fictional) person responsible for a long list of ‘Lambisms’ is Herron’s fabulous creation, Jackson Lamb. Lamb is the head of Slough House, the office where MI5 sends its spies to atrophy when they’ve messed up. Herron has just published the ninth Slow Horses book, Clown Town.
Jackson Lamb treats everybody – including himself – pretty poorly. But he’s very, very funny in a delightfully sardonic and disgusting way. He throws out lines like: "Breaking his neck without going through your line manager, that shit stays on your record."
When the first book in the series – Slow Horses – was published in 2010, Mick Herron had a second book in the series ready to go, but, surprisingly, he couldn’t get anyone to publish it. If it was a spy novel, they reasoned, why was it funny and if it was a funny book, why was it so tense?
"I don’t pitch books, I just write the books I want to write but if I had pitched it, I think it would’ve been turned down flat. It doesn’t sound very exciting, it sounds quite dour and depressing really, writing about failure and thwarted ambition and unhappy people working in unhappy offices."
There are plenty of jokes in there, don’t worry. Herron doesn’t talk much, considering he’s a wordsmith, but luckily, Oliver had plenty of questions to fire at him. The inspiration for Slow Horses? A building he used to walk past on the way to work every day:
"It started with the location. There was a building that I grew particularly fascinated by and I decided I would use it as a location and it all grew from there, really. The notion of failure and people thwarted in their careers and frustrated, all grew out of office life, really."
Although Herron doesn’t remember the exact moment when the character that would become Jackson Lamb formed in his mind, he knew he needed a particular type of "office manager" to rule over them:
"I knew that if I was putting these failures together in an office environment, and the remit of the office is that they should all be made so unhappy that they quit and stop being a nuisance, therefore it was necessary for them to have a boss who would make their lives miserable and it grew from there."
The ninth book, Herron tells Oliver, has an Irish connection:
"One of the triggers for the plot was the Stakeknife case. But I was very careful not to do any research into Stakeknife. I knew the broad outline of what the case was about, but what I was interested in was the effect this might have had on those who worked on that operation."
Herron imagined someone who might’ve joined the intelligence services for the best of reasons being tasked with protecting a man who’s murdered and tortured people. What does that do to your sense of honour, to your sense of morality? That’s one of the main themes of Clown Town.
It probably sounds very serious – and it probably is – but Herron’s Slough House books, as well as being tension-filled, are very funny. Anyone who’s seen the Apple TV+ series based on Herron’s books will have seen just how funny the characters are, especially the great Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb.
You can hear Oliver’s full conversation with Mick Herron by tapping or clicking above.
Clown Town by Mick Herron is published by Baskerville.
The fifth season of Slow Horses drops on Apple TV+ on 24 September.
