Mick Herron (born 11 July 1963 in Newcastle upon Tyne) is a British novelist best known for the Slough House spy thrillers, about a group of disgraced MI5 officers, which began with “Slow Horses” in 2010 and have been adapted for Apple TV+ with Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. He won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for “Dead Lions” and its Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 2025.
Herron studied English at Balliol College, Oxford, and still lives in the city. After some years writing poetry he turned to fiction while working in London as a subeditor on a journal of employment law, writing about 350 words a day around his commute. His first novel, “Down Cemetery Road”, was published in 2003. It opened a four-book series set largely in Oxford and featuring the private detective Zoë Boehm.
The Slough House series concerns intelligence officers who have been exiled from the MI5 mainstream for various failures and now work under Jackson Lamb, a character Herron has said was influenced by Reginald Hill’s Andy Dalziel. “Slow Horses” sold poorly at first, and its original British publisher declined the sequel. Soho Press kept the series going in the United States, and John Murray began republishing it in the UK in 2015. Herron left his subediting job in 2017.
There are now nine Slough House novels, the most recent being “Clown Town” (2025), along with five novellas. The standalone novels “Reconstruction”, “Nobody Walks” and “The Secret Hours” share characters with the series. Herron’s short stories, many first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, are collected in “Dolphin Junction”.
“Spook Street” won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger in 2017 and “Slough House” won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year in 2022. Herron was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024.
The television series “Slow Horses” started on Apple TV+ in April 2022, and its sixth season, based on “Joe Country” and “Slough House”, arrived in September 2026. An adaptation of “Down Cemetery Road” starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson followed in October 2025 and has been renewed for a second season.
Publication Order of Slough House Books
| Slow Horses | 2010 |
| Dead Lions | 2013 |
| The List | 2015 |
| Real Tigers | 2016 |
| Spook Street | 2017 |
| London Rules | 2018 |
| The Drop / The Marylebone Drop | 2018 |
| Joe Country | 2019 |
| The Catch | 2020 |
| The Last Dead Letter | 2020 |
| Slough House | 2021 |
| Bad Actors | 2022 |
| Standing by the Wall | 2022 |
| Clown Town | 2025 |
Publication Order of Zoë Boehm Books
| Down Cemetery Road | 2003 |
| The Last Voice You Hear | 2004 |
| Why We Die | 2006 |
| Smoke and Whispers | 2009 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Reconstruction | 2008 |
| Nobody Walks | 2015 |
| This Is What Happened | 2018 |
| The Secret Hours | 2023 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| All the Livelong Day | 2013 |
| Dolphin Junction | 2021 |
Photo: TimDuncan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).