Mick Herron: ‘Most people didn’t know I was writing – I was a secretive kind of writer’

His spy series became the TV hit Slow Horses, and now his earlier novels are being adapted for screen, starring Emma Thompson. Mick Herron talks about finding recognition

“Let me guess,” says a woman exiting a private detective’s office and finding another one coming in. “You’ve got a husband, he’s got a secretary. Am I getting warm?” So far, so Raymond Chandler, and, indeed, Zoë Boehm, first glimpsed storming out of a row with her husband, fellow gumshoe Joe Silverman, has more than a touch of hard-boiled noir about her: sardonic eyes and laughter lines, cigarette jammed into mouth, a handbag from whose depths she can produce not only vodka but a small silver gun. “I read once that you should take salt on a long journey,” she later declares. “To liven up what you catch and eat.”

But Zoë is not in the canyons and boulevards of Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles, she is in pre-millennial Oxford, the setting for Mick Herron’s first novel, Down Cemetery Road, now being reissued and adapted by Apple TV+, the makers of the award-winning Slow Horses series. Emma Thompson will play Zoë, with Ruth Wilson taking the role of Sarah Tucker, a woman whose problem is not her husband’s secretary, but the fact that one of her neighbour’s houses has just been blown up. There are four Boehm books, all to make a reappearance, providing plenty for the screenwriters to get their teeth into.