📝 Mick Herron’s Writing Routine

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For more than a decade, Mick Herron wrote his novels in the evenings after long commutes from Oxford to London. He’d get home at six, maybe eat something, and then squeeze in an hour of writing—350 words, give or take—before bed. It was a punishing rhythm. By day, he was a subeditor on a legal journal. By night, he was quietly building one of the most original voices in contemporary crime fiction.

Herron’s breakthrough didn’t come early. His first spy novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010 to critical acclaim and commercial silence. The idea was simple but ingenious: what if MI5 had a dumping ground for failed spies? A purgatory for washouts, embarrassments, and quiet disasters? That’s Slough House—a grimy outpost for screwups, misfits, and burnouts—and its residents, nicknamed “slow horses,” are meant to rot away in administrative obscurity. But under the leadership of the brilliant and grotesque Jackson Lamb, they somehow keep getting drawn into national crises.

Herron didn’t set out to write a series. In fact, he was planning to blow Slough House up at the end of book one. But something about the setting—its bleak humor, its shifting moral terrain, its damaged but vividly human characters—kept calling him back. Over time, he developed a tone unlike anything else in the genre: part Le Carré, part Wodehouse, part The Thick of It. The dialogue crackles. The pacing bites. And the characters stay with you—Catherine Standish, the recovering alcoholic with a spine of steel; River Cartwright, the legacy case weighed down by family history; and Roddy Ho, the world’s most insufferable IT genius.

And then there’s Lamb, the monstrous, flatulent, chain-smoking ringmaster of the entire circus. He’s politically incorrect to the point of being radioactive, but he’s also brilliant, loyal in his own feral way, and, somehow, impossible to look away from.

Herron’s early Slough House novels were almost entirely overlooked. His UK publisher passed on the second book. The American independent publisher Soho Press took a chance and released Dead Lions anyway—and to everyone’s surprise, it won the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 2013. A few years later, a John Murray editor picked up a copy of Slow Horses at a train station and saw what everyone else had missed. The publisher rereleased the series. Waterstones chose Slow Horses as its thriller of the month. Word of mouth spread.

It was the slowest of slow burns. But it worked.

Today, Herron is widely hailed as the best spy novelist of his generation. His books have sold more than three million copies worldwide. Slow Horses has been adapted into a hit Apple TV+ series starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. And yet, for all the accolades, Herron remains disarmingly modest. He still writes every day. Still fusses over his paragraphs. Still doesn’t own a smartphone.

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