Bestselling author Mick Herron returns to the newsletter this week with our conversation about “Clown Town,” the latest installment in his Slow Horses spy series, published earlier this week by Soho Crime.
If you’ve read the bestselling novels, listened to the excellent audiobooks or watched the Apple TV+ series that returns for its fifth season on Sept. 24 – or maybe you’ve enjoyed all of them – you’ll know the Slow Horses stories offer an engrossing mix of intrigue, comedy and deeply flawed characters.
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Herron and I last spoke in 2022, and he is a delight: modest, funny, and generous with his time and his thoughts. It’s worth remembering that prior to his recent successes, Herron had been dropped by his British publisher after the first novel, and his second, “Dead Lions,” was rejected by other U.K. publishers.
“One or two said, we can’t publish this. We don’t know what it is – Is it a comedy? Is it a thriller?” he told me then. “My own viewpoint has always been that they are thrillers, and they happen to have a certain amount of humor in them … This is the only way I know how to write these books.”
Through the efforts of Soho Press here and the publisher John Murray in the U.K., the books are reaching their audience.
“It wasn’t a matter of me insisting or persevering against all the odds. It was just me carrying on doing what I do, because I didn’t know how to do anything differently,” he said. “Eventually, thanks to publishers, Soho Press here with John Murray on the other side of the Atlantic, they found a readership.”
It was during our 2022 conversation that he told me about a thriller that had meant a lot to him as an aspiring writer.
“‘Gorky Park’ just blew me away. I thought, nobody’s going to write a better thriller,” he told me. “So far, nobody has, as far as I’m aware.”
Reading recommendations like that are pretty much irresistible – and I can remember a time when “Gorky Park” was as common in people’s homes as the Yellow Pages – so I got a copy from the library and jumped in. And I could see what he means (and why it sold more than 3 million copies): It’s a terrific book, an atmospheric mystery about a decent, but flawed detective working in a menacing Soviet-era Moscow.
Its author, Martin Cruz Smith, published a new novel in July, “Hotel Ukraine,” the 11th featuring his character Detective Arkady Renko. I’d been meaning to read further through the Arkady backlist in hopes of talking to him about the earlier novels as well as this last one, which takes place after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but Smith, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the ‘90s, died three days after its publication.
“He was a writer, and he did it beautifully and valiantly until the very end,” said Sean Manning, vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster – and Smith’s editor – in a statement.
There’s much more to say about Smith, but when I heard he’d passed, my first thought was of that 2022 conversation with Mick Herron, grateful that, like a good book citizen, he’d shared a novel he loved with other readers.
So I hope you’ll read our most recent conversation: We talk about the books, the empathy of readers toward unlikable characters and the TV series, including his thoughts on Gary Oldman’s version of Jackson Lamb and how he learned that Mick Jagger would be doing the theme song.
*GIFT LINK*
‘Slow Horses’ author Mick Herron reveals the secret origins of Slough House
Free Book Event
The 7th annual Los Angeles Libros Festival returns on Saturday, Sept. 13, at Los Angeles’s Central Library (630 W. 5th St.) with a day of entertainment, including Spanish-language and bilingual storytelling, music, workshops and more.
It’s free and open to the general public, and some events will be livestreamed.
And the authors coming are impressive: Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Vanessa Mota, and friend of the newsletter Lilliam Rivera – not to mention a performance by Banda Las Angelinas and much more.
To find out more or to reserve your free tickets, go to Eventbrite.