Sara & Cariad's Weirdos Book Club - Clown Town by Mick Herron with Mick Herron

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

This week's book guest is Clown Town by Mick Herron.Sara and Cariad are joined by the mystery and thriller novelist and author Mick Herron, author of the best selling Slough House series which has been adapted into the Slow Horses television series.In this episode they discuss Gary Oldman, gaffa tape, gag writing, MI5 and farts.Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you!Clown Town by Mick Herron is available here.Tickets for Sara's tour show I Am A Strange Gloop are available to buy from sarapascoe.co.ukCariad’s children's book Where Did She Go? is available to buy now.Follow Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club on Instagram @saraandcariadsweirdosbookclub and Twitter @weirdosbookclub Recorded and edited by Naomi Parnell for Plosive.Artwork by Welcome Studio.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Pasco. And I'm Carriead Lloyd. And we're weird about books. We love to read. We read too much. We talk too much. About the too much that we've read. Which is why we created the weirdos book club. A space for the lonely outsider to feel accepted and appreciated. Each week we're joined by amazing comedian guests and writer guests to discuss some wonderfully and crucially weird books, writing, reading and just generally being a weirdo. You don't even need to have read the books to join in. It will be a really interesting, wide-ranging conversation and maybe you'll want to read the book afterwards. We will share all the upcoming. books we're going to be discussing on our Instagram, Sarah and Carriads, Weirdo's Book Club. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you. This week's book guest is Clown Town by Mick Herron. What's it about? The spies at Slough House and their continued catastrophes. What qualifies it for the Weirdoes Book Club? Well, Jackson Lamb is a one-of-a-kind man. Thank God. In this episode we discuss Gary Oldman, Gaffer Tape, gag writing, MI5 and Fart. And joining us this week is Mick Heerer. Mick Heron is a mystery and thriller novelist. He's written many books, the most famous of which is the Slough House series, which is adapted by Apple TV. You might know it as slow horses.

Welcome to the podcast, Mick Heron. We're excited. So am I. Thank you very much for inviting me. Oh, thank you for being here. It's very exciting. On my not birthday. On your not birthday, yes, we should talk about this. Fake news on the internet. Wikipedia says that your birthday is today.

And so I brought you a cake on the way in because I thought, poor man is coming to do a book podcast. His birthday. Carriad message to the WhatsApp group. Panicking. It's his birthday. It's spending it with us. Should we sing as he comes in? Should we get bunting?

But then someone is lying on Wikipedia. I know. My faith in the internet is absolutely collapsed. I wonder whether there's any other misinformation out there. I think it's just this. Have you ever had any fake information, Carriad? Oh, I don't know. I can't think of any.

I mean, sure I have. For a while, Wikipedia said that I was married to a comedian called John Richardson. He's a very successful comedian. I mean, he's very handsome, I wouldn't mind. I mean, I'm not saying, but he had an actual wife at the time. But she was also blonde. Also blonde comedian. Yeah, do you think they were just like, oh, you must be Lucy Beaumont?

I just left it for a year. Did you? Because I thought, if you're going there for your facts in inverted commas, well, it's just a different version of the world. Yeah, there's something, they told me this when I was on name drop QI, that their Wikipedia, actually the majority of it is done by very few people. and there was one boy in Arkansas that was responsible for about like 25% of the articles

and he was making them up. He was like a teenager in his bedroom, this was his video games, he was just making up so much stuff that because it was so prolific and then people were linking to it and then they believed it. They were like, oh, these things became facts

and then eventually they had to realize, oh, this is one person. But everything has to have a source so it sort of disappears from there, doesn't it? Yeah, but if you're like that involved in it, you just keep putting up a page saying, I suppose you become your own source after a while. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Things kept getting linked back to other pages that he had lied about for different things. And he was lying about so many different things. So it just became like, oh, these must be facts because they've been there for years. Yeah. And then eventually they were like quite a significant amount of this is true. I'm just glad I never do any research then. Because if I did, Wikipedia would my first start.

Well, yeah. Well, that brings us to your writing. Because I, one of the, actually, we should talk about how you got into writing first. But then we should talk about how you've finally. out so much about spies, because you'd think that would be difficult to research. I was thinking, he must be a spy. Well, I get that a lot. Yeah.

I was like, come on. Didn't John Nicarre used to get accused of that as well? Or he was somehow, like he knew people. He did actually work for both M.O.5 and MS-6 in this time. So that was fair enough. That was fair enough, isn't it? With me, no. I do make it all up.

I mean, I like this guy in Arkansas. Yeah, are you him? It's my cover identity. No, I've never worked for the intelligence. services in any way, shape or form. But I've read a lot of books. I've seen a lot of films. And I just... Got good imagination. I'm not, in a way, I'm not really writing about spies. I'm writing about working in an office, which I have done. And that's where most of it comes from. So tell us about your journey into writing. Was it a childhood ambition?

I think I was my journey into work. So that's how you got here today. Because I read that you started in poetry. Like you started writing poetry first? I wrote verse before I wrote prose fiction. Yes, this is going back a long time when I was at, Just after, really, just after I was at university. And did that for a few years, and it just kind of stopped for me. I did, I never published a collection at all. I published in small magazines. They're all small, poetry magazines.

And then it just kind of stopped happening, which I kind of know why now. I didn't at the time. And so writing prose fiction became a kind of substitute for that. I needed some kind of outlet for the, I don't know, creative energies that I had. That was pretentious, wasn't it? No, no. And you didn't start with the Slough House ones, did you? There's the other, the Zoe, the Zoe. How do you say that? Bowen. I wish I knew. Bowen is good.

Zoe Bowen. Zoe Boeham. Oxford ones were your first for a. That's right. I live there and that's where I set the first novels that I wrote. Yes, there were four of them. There were five novels, I think, before I wrote the first of the Slough House novels. And four of them were about Zoe. Was there a moment during that the sort of Zoe period that you thought, oh, I, I, I, I'm going to carry on or I'm happy with this

or, you know what I mean? Like what allowed you to keep going as a writer when you're not experiencing the level of success you have now? Or any at all. I find fulfillment in writing. I mean, as I said, I took up writing prose fiction because the poetry dried up. So it was something that I had to do.

And I was being published. I wasn't being read particularly, but the books are in libraries, which is nice. And it satisfied that need in me to do something. I mean, that's the best way to write, really, for yourself. Yeah, I'd never applied myself to a career, really. I mean, I had a decent enough job, but it wasn't what you'd call a career. But this was what I wanted to do.

You know, the job was putting food on the table, putting a roof over my head, and the writing was satisfying everything else within me that needed satisfying of you. Yeah. And in terms of creating a new set of characters, did that happen where you felt, and did they sort of start existing in your peripheral brain, Or did you think, okay, Zoe, this world has sort of exhausted itself a little bit. I'll find a new one. How conscious was that?

I had written three of the Zoe books. I call them Zoe books. Actually, there's a character called Sarah who's much more important, certainly in the first novel. That's right. Sarah's such a common name. Then Zoe came into her own in the following books. And then I wrote a sort of standalone thriller, which I had thought, okay, if I'm going to ever become successful, this is it. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Do a big one. So I did and it disappeared without trace. I'm very glad I wrote it. It's still there. But it wasn't a success. So I thought, okay, that's where I am. I've been shown my place as it were. So I'll carry on. And I wrote another Zoe book. And then the idea for Slough House came into my mind while I was writing that fourth Zoe book. I haven't very good at career planning. But the one decision that I'm proud of having made is that when this idea for Slow Horses came to mind, the temptation. was to put the book I was writing aside and just dive straight in. But I didn't. I spent a year finishing that book. And during that year, I think it all started to come together and became much more coherent than it would have been if I just launched straight into it. So when I wrote Slow Horses, I was ready to write it. You know, I'd been building up for a while. Oh, that's so nice to think it was just brewing in the background, but you were still writing and expressing yourself creatively and learning and, you know, improving himself as a writer. But Slauhaus was just brewing. It felt like having something in the bank.

Hemingway's writing advice was always to stop I mean usually I think because he was too pissed but to always stop when you knew the next thing that was going to happen never stop after you'd written that thing because then you started the next day with something already ready like desperate to come out so that's holding off

as daily advice goes I think that's very good yes if you know what you're going to do tomorrow that's a good place to stop yeah and then also part of you your brain is still working it over so by the time you get to the computer it probably has enriched itself a little bit. One of the problems of discussing how writing works is it's so much of it, what's going on,

is going on right to the back of your head, is doing it when you're not actually involved in the process of writing. So I'll stop, you know, have my evening, go to sleep, wake up, start again. The back of my brain has been working on stuff. You're doing lots of work. I've got no idea of what it's doing, you know. I have to describe that though, but I know exactly what you mean, that kind of like cogs whirring at the back and you kind of have to have this ability as a writer to like let

that happen. but do you think is it something you had from the very beginning or do you think you learned to trust? I suspected something that you learn. But I think that as with most aspects of writing, you learn more from reading than you do from actually the practice of writing. Yeah. I mean, obviously you learned from both, but reading is more important. Were you a big reader as a child? Oh, yeah.

What were you reading when you were younger? What was like? I suppose it comes down to everything I could lay my hands on really. I was someone who would read the back of the cereal packet on the record. the breakfast table. The usual stuff. I mean, Ina Blyton was the huge author when I was young. And, I mean, she gets a bad press these days for reasons,

some good, some, you know, unnecessary. But the fact is she was like a never-ending fount of story. And I think when you're a young reader, what do you want his story? You're not that bothered about the quality. You just want the quantity. And she had the quantity. It was never-ending.

So there were all the different series to read, you know, from the Famous Five and the Find Outers. Secret Seven. all of that stuff. And they were page turny, plotty. They're quite spilot, can't it? Yes. I once let myself, this is while I was doing at school,

I once managed to get back into the house, not having my key with me. With the key trick? With the paper underneath. Oh my God. It works. When my dad used to read me Secret 7, I didn't do Famous Five,

and that key trick, I just blew my mind that you, if you haven't listeners know this trick, you put a piece of paper, you slide it under the door, and then you get wire and wiggle the key, the key falls down, and you can slide it on. You do need a gap under the door.

You need a gap under the door. You need the gap under the door. You've got that sort of hairy skirt. Thick carpet. Oh yeah, the hairy skirt. The draft is glued. Yeah, it won't work. Yeah.

I had a lock on my bedroom door. So I used to lock it and then do that trick to get into my own room. Not to get out. No, no, no. Just to make it more exciting going to bed. Yeah, just to be like, oh, I've done this trick from the Secret 7. But yeah, did you get in trouble for doing it? Did you say?

No, no. No. Got yourself back in the house. Yeah. I could have done that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Me and my sister used to lose our keys all the time. My mum worked, so we broke on purpose the upstairs barfront window so that we could just use a ladder and get in and out as we pleased. She was furious. Yeah. I can actually see her point of view.

Yeah, sometimes we leave the ladder there next to an open window. Can we jump to talking about the character of Lamb? Sure. Because he is, he shouldn't be as lovable as he is. I find him very lovable. I don't. I'm sure that's what lots of really. So we should say Jackson Lamb is in the Slough House series, which begins with slow horses, and the book we are talking about today is Clown Town, which is the most recent of the Slough House series, just in case people haven't caught up with the whole series. Yeah, in the TV series, Jackson Lam is played by Gary Oldman. Yeah, so he's become this kind of like anti-hero, hasn't he? But I think he's a hero here, in my opinion.

Maybe that's what we can discuss, Mick. How you feel about him. I never tried to put him in a box when I started. I was simply writing the character as it occurred. And you mentioned before asking how the characters came into being. I mean, they're kind of vague shapes until I actually started writing. I mean, for me, the characters only really start to develop when they're in, essentially when they're talking to other characters.

I mean, it's the dialogue that really matters. So I knew that Lam was going to be an overbearing boss, shall we say, because of the general situation. These people are in Sloughhouse because they've messed up in one way or another. So they're all feeling very thwarted and frustrated. But the whole point of Sloughhouse is to encourage them to give up to make their lives as unhappy as possible. So obviously whoever I was in charge of them

was going to be somebody who was there to make their situation worse. So I knew he was going to be a bully and treat them unfairly at any possible opportunity. He seems very harsh on the surface. He's very rude to people. He hasn't got good manners. He's a bit disgusting. He makes fun of them.

He's sort of filthy, dirty drinks. Well, that's it. There's lots of lots of. And lots of farting. Farting. And just general smoking indoors. It's very old school, I think, I guess you would say. It doesn't seem to have caught up with the 21st century.

Indeed. I mean, it couldn't possibly happen in any actual workplace. You all know that. But what I discovered, I mean, this is a few books in, really, as I started to get to know him. It was important not to let the readers know how much of what he does is an act and how much of it is real. because if we knew, if readers knew what he was thinking and feeling, they would know that either it is an act and he's not really as bad as that, or it's all true.

And that would make him horrendous. You cannot be lovable if what he was saying he genuinely felt and believed. If he genuinely didn't care about them. Because he said some pretty abhoring things. Well, it's a bit like a will, they, won't they, in a rumcom. If you're looking at a male character going, he does like her really, but he just can't ever show it because he's protecting his feelings. And I guess the audience or the reader projects lots of hopeful romance there, judging from sort of behaviour, small actions.

And that's what happens with Lamb. It's essentially Mr Rochester, isn't he? Yeah, yeah. I haven't thought of him that way, but I will forever. A farting, Mr. Rochester. Because his actions make us believe again and again he does care. He actually has a really, he has a morality. There is a very consistent logic to how he behaves, which is.

that he will protect them. But obviously he is very dismissive of this, and it's because they're so rubbish, he has to come in and save them, not because he cares about them in any way. He does, I feel, have a moral code. You're quite right. And the purpose of most of the plots of the book

ought to put him in a situation where he has to act on it, because he would much rather just be in his office, smoking, drinking and farthing. Yeah. Having horrible takeaways. Really horrible courage. But convenient.

But I shy away from the notion that he does all this because he cares for his crew. He cares for the fact that they are his crew. So it's more like you don't mess with his stuff. He is, and I've often said this at events, he's like, he's shop floor, but he's been promoted to management, but his heart is still on the shop floor. He supports them because of the job that they do, not because of the people that they are. He doesn't care about the people, but he does think that people, those who are doing the jobs that they are in do need protection. and he will protect them largely from what he calls the suits,

those higher up the chain. What happens as a result of their general machinations? Because in particular that's what happens in this book, is that you've got someone. And we're not going to give too many spoilers because people read these books to find out what happens. And your books obviously are well ahead of the TV show. So people when they are like, where's series four or where's series five?

They can come back to the books as I have to sort of find out what happens next. In this book, there is a plan, a plot put in place by someone very high up at the park, and there are ramifications to the slow horses. And the slow horses are they're used, aren't they, as collateral damage? Which is their usual role, it has to be said. They usually are on the receiving end of whatever's going on. It's giving very, like, trench vibes, you know? like a kind of like that's what lamb reminds me of of like world war one commander that's like

people above just send these troops over the wall i do go over the top a lot in us yeah yeah and you know the slow horses are like you said i think what's so interesting about lamb is that he cares about them because they're in this institution not because of who they are so they're his troops but it doesn't give a shit about the like individual troops but yeah it has that very sort of I guess, universal feel that we can all understand that people above don't always treat people below as people, it's collateral. Again, as I say, this comes from office life

from the military. But it's applicable to a lot of situations. I mean, they do say, I don't know who they are, but they do say that any group of people that you're writing about fall into a family dynamic sooner or later. And I mean, that's easily done with the slow house crew. You as a writer, do you get attached to the characters because you have to kill off quite a lot

or you choose to kill off quite a lot. I try not to be sentimental about them, but yes, if I kill the character off and it does happen quite a lot, that's one of the plot points that I have in mind before I start writing a book. I would never halfway through a book think this needs something dramatic to happen,

I'm going to kill X. It's always there, along with the vague plot trigger and usually a kind of destination, I know where I'm heading with the book. But the death of a character, her main character, will always be one of those plot points. And I do, I don't take it lightly, and readers don't either, I have to say. But this is, for me, it's largely because, although, I mean, I don't believe that any of these people are real, you know, I'm playing with words on a page.

But they each represent, hopefully, a different viewpoint. They each have a voice that none of the other characters has. So whenever I kill one of them off, I can no longer use that voice. And there are several characters whom I miss in that respect. I can no longer inhabit their characteristics, their, you know, personality. inverted commas and express myself through their voice. I can't do that only once they're dead. So I do miss them and I don't take it lightly.

But it's almost as if I'd be untrue to the book I'm trying to write if I have that as one of the triggers for the novel and then say I'm not actually going to use it. I think it might express itself in the novel. That might be a bit woo-woo, but that's how I feel about it. And obviously then once there is a space vacated in Slough House, you get to bring in a new character or new characters. So with choosing those, is it about voice perspective that you're sort of starting with?

I do have something of revolving door policy. Well, the handy thing about the overall scenario is that somebody's coming into Slough House. We know that there's a backstory there because they must have done something to put them in. So in the creation of the backstory, inevitably a personality starts to accrue around that. But as I say, until I've actually put them there and got them in dialogue with other characters, I don't really... They're not really there until... Yeah, yeah.

That's so interesting, isn't it? I found it really interesting, especially knowing that we were going to get to speak to you and reading Clown Town, that the characters all have very different styles of jokes. So you have to write jokes in very different ways for Lamb, for Shirley, for instance, or for Roddy Ho, who I can't help being very sorry for. I just feel very sorry for him. He would be offended. I know, I know.

And that's what makes me feel so sorry for him. So how does that go? Is that something that is part of the... Because obviously you're thinking of so many things at once. I'm imagining that when you're first writing, it must be so plot-driven. So is it something that comes in later in an edit where you think, oh, that's a lamb joke in the wrong character's mouth,

or it's very distinct for you? I've very occasionally realised that I've put the joke in the mouth of the wrong character. But that's... I mean, I'm not thinking of the plot overall when I'm writing, I deal with a paragraph at a time, a sentence at a time. Because I write, as many, many writers do, from the point of view of the character that I'm writing about. I mean, all the scenes tend to be in the head, if you like, of one given character.

Then it's their voice that I'm using. And I don't overthink, I hope, the notion of what kind of things they would say. But it's kind of obvious. I mean, Shirley and Roddy, for instance, are both quite an extreme character. Yes. So I know the viewpoint that Shirley is going to have. Basically, she's going to be pissed off with everybody and she's going to be grumpy.

Roddy thinks he's the centre of the universe and that's always going to come out in what he thinks and what he says. So it's, you know, and I'm nine books in now. I wouldn't say it's natural. I mean, there's a lot of hard work involved. But with the main characters there and adopting their points of view, I kind of know where I am with them. How, I mean, I'm sure you've been asked this lot, but like having an adaptation. of your book is one thing, having it become so hugely globally successful, how is it writing after, you know, Gary Oldman exists and that's who people are thinking of. Do you, do you have

to struggle to hold onto your Jackson line? Is he acting in your head? Yeah, that's what I was wondering. He isn't, I think I was very fortunate in that, in two ways, I mean, partly that it's become very, very successful. But also that that didn't happen until a relatively late stage. Yeah. I was seven novels in, I think. I was writing. Bad actors. I was writing bad actors when I was watching the first season being shot. And that's where a lot of that imagery comes from in the book. There's a lot of film and TV and dramatic imagery of one sort or another. And so they were all, I was kind of well established in my own head,

my own routines in my own processes by that time. And I've never written to pictures in my head. Oh, really? When I say that, I'm pretty sure that I don't in general. I write to vocabulary. I write to putting words on the page. And that's my medium, the page. It's very rare that I do have something in my head, you know, a scene in my head that I'm trying to translate into prose. Generally, the prose comes first and that kind of dictates how the scene is going to run.

That's not 100% the case. There are occasions where I do have, where it happens the other way around. But that happened, you know, before it was on TV and happens occasionally now. But I don't generally have the actors in mind. Also, I don't think it would matter that much. I think that all the cast are all fantastic, have brought the page to the screen, as I'm where they're. They've all, to wander again, no, they've all been reading the books. You know, some of them have been reading them series by series.

And Saskia has read all of them about three times over them. And they've all become very involved in the characters and how they portray them. So they're not simply going by the script and sort of bringing themselves to the dialogue. And the screenwriters have, they've wanted to bring your books to life. They haven't made huge changes, have they? The changes that they've made have tended to be the necessary plot changes because you can't put a book onto the screen. as it is.

As we've established, now, I write, like many, many writers do with a lot of interiority. And a lot of what I'm writing is saying, this is how the character is, what's the character's thinking, this is how she's feeling. And you can't simply, unless you had a voice over throughout, you can't put that on the screen. So changes have to be made in order to, you know, illustrate. As a matter of illustrating the text, putting it up on the screen. Do you feel grateful that it was seven books in, like you said before this happened?

Do you feel like it gives these, you had time for these characters to breathe and you to find their story. Oh, absolutely. One of the reasons it was so long is simply the amount of time it takes, as I'm sure you know, to put something on the television. The first conversations I had

with the producer, the exact producer, at Seasol. There were only two books in print at that point. And by the time we saw it on screen, there were, I think, seven of them, possibly even eight. So there's a long process of getting something made. So for a lot of that time,

not all of, for a lot of that time, I knew that they were going to end up on TV sooner or later. That was going on at the back of my mind. It wasn't something you thought about or not. It means that the actors who were acting in series one, some of them did know when they were going to get killed off in later series. They knew, okay, I'm only in a couple of these.

And some of the existing actors must be sort of really, really hoping. Because I think you're... It's a bit like Game of Thrones. Do you remember we had friends in Game of Thrones? And when they got the job, they were coming to our slightly more sci-fi fantasy friends and being like, what happens to my character? And, like, people being able to go, oh, it's not good. Or be able to go, don't worry, you're in all of them.

Your character sells through. But, like, yeah, as an actor, this world already existing that you're walking into. And, of course, they have that strange situation now where the ending in the books might differ from the TV screen. Yeah, yeah. I don't know that's happened before, has it? Yeah, no. Well, they overtook, didn't they? Like, the TV show overtook him writing it, which is, yeah, it's weird.

And the Zoe books, as I'm calling them, are about to be happy. are being adapted with Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson. They will be shown reasonably soon. Oh, that's exciting. I don't think I'm allowed to say when. I do no way. But they've already filmed it. Yeah, they've been filmed it.

It's been filmed. I haven't seen it yet. I've seen little bits. Got a cameo. Have you? My partner and I've been in three of the slow horses. We're in Down Cemetery Road as well. That's cool.

I'm so exciting. I can you miss us? Yeah. Are you a writer who wants to be there as much as they'll let you? Or do you like to sort of have some distance? Distance, I think. I think on the whole. I mean, I do like to be there

and see how it's going on. It's always fun. It's always exciting. If you're, I mean, you're much more used to the TV world than I am. If you're a visitor, then it is fascinating. Even the boring stuff is fascinating.

Watching them do the same thing over and over again. You know, I can do that for a day. I don't think I could do it for a fortline. Yeah, it is boring. So you're saying that you're not particularly, you weren't particularly obsessed with spies, but like it's become, obviously, like, what you're writing about,

Have you found yourself drawn to other spy writing since writing this? I mean, to some degree, I've always read other spy writers. I read La Caryre when I was a teenager and always admired him. I read Lend Aiton as well. I re-read Lend Aten a couple of years ago. I hadn't read them since the very early books I hadn't read since I was a teenager, the ones that were written in the 60s, 70s. And I reread them to, I was reviewing us to review them.

They were reassued as Penguin Classics or something. And I read the first four. and I thought, I have taken so much from these books who are realising it, you know, the stuff that I end up because they're all off his set and there's a lot of humour in them and a lot of class stuff in there as well. And I had not realised quite how much of an influence he had been

on what I was writing, at least 30 years later. All aspects of creativity are taking part in a dialogue, aren't they? It's not expressing a monologue that you've created entirely out of your own being. Well, there may be some complete outliers who are able to do that. Well, Samuel Beckett said that if you were, if you're, you were using language, then you had learned that somewhere, and thus everything was plagiarism. I think some universities might just prove it.

You don't think, your thoughts aren't plagiarism, but the minute you put it into language, that is a learned symbol system, so you're borrowing on other things that other people have told you. Can we look at joke formation in your book? Would you find this? Joke formation? Absolutely. Because I love it.

Are you doing a little PhD on jokes in McCarran's Sloughhouse? I would, actually, because actually also, your narrator makes jokes and has a different style to any of the characters again. So let's look at some characters and their joke formation. This isn't so much a joke as this is a really gorgeous observation about holding a gun. Only an amateur strikes up a conversation with an armed man while standing behind him, which was precisely what C.C. was now because that's what a gun does. And I love this.

Turns a loved one into an armed man, except when it does the other thing it does, which is turn a loved one into a draft excluder. That is so callous. I'm never like a good taste to get in the way of it. But so there's a, what would you call it? Sort of a lack of empathy that exists very strongly in Lamb and sometimes exists in their other characters. But it feels so, of course it is,

because this is the world that they live in, which is a world of dead bodies and guns. Yeah, it's like talking to nurses or like palliative care doctors, isn't it? Like Gallo's humour is just. Black humor is always the refuge of the emergency services. Yeah. Yeah, I would say that the narrative voice in the books is not me. It is another character, really, because it is a far more cynical tone of voice than I would recognize as being my actual self.

It was finding that tone of voice right at the beginning of slow horses. That's when I knew that I was in territory that I'd be pleased to call my own. I knew I could work there. And it was, whenever it was the sixth book that it started that I found that I'd come through, you know, writing his own books. Well, there's a lot of humor in it, but it's not quite like that. Yeah. And I'd found a tone of voice that I thought, I can work with this, I can do, I can write these books with this voice. Yeah.

So, I mean, yeah, so it's a kind of, it is a kind of acting or improvising in a character. Yeah, yes, yes. In the same way that writing from a character's point of view, I try to pretend I am that character to all extent. Yeah. To some extent. The same thing with the narrative voice adopting that kind of detached, often detached tone. Do you remember the moment you came up with the, like the slow horses analogy? Do you remember thinking, oh, that's good?

The actual phrase. Yeah, because I found it in another book. I mean, that was a direct steel. It's a Don Winslow novel called The Winter of Frankie Machine. Do you know Winslow's work, American thriller writing? He's very, very good and totally he's extraordinary. He can write very, very charming, very lovable novels and really bleak black ones. He's written about the drugs business, the cartels in the States now,

which is extraordinary piece of work. There are three of them. The power of the dog, the cartel and the border. He's written amazingly about that. But there's a... His thriller, The Winter of Frankie Machine, he describes a gambler. The reason why he's so unsuccessful

is that he has a fondness for slow horses. And I'd been working on the series at the time. The idea, I hadn't started writing it, and I just saw the phrase slow horses, and I thought, great, I'm having that. So the whole business of Slough House. Slough House was invented. The term was invented.

to provide the excuse for them being called slow horses. I mean, in the book it's the other way around. You know, that's Sloughhouse because it might as all being slow. And therefore, they're called Slow Horses because it kind of rhymes. But in fact, slow horses came first. But when I met Don a few years ago, I was able to tell him this. I was very pleased to be able to do. I've often said it in public, but to be able to tell him about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was he okay about it? I'll paraphrase it because I'm remembering it badly, so I'm really sorry to do this to your face. Mick, he says that person should take a runy dump and Standish Corrects. the phrase, you know, you're looking for is a running jump, and he went, no, I meant what I'm about to do in the toilet.

Because so often it's wordplay, it's him getting a word wrong on purpose to do quite a genius-level joke. And it's often discussing. But this one, I loved so much because, yeah, he's getting words wrong. You might think with the character is a sign of sub-intelligence, but actually he knows what he's saying. He's having fun with language, and it's so enjoyable. And I imagine it must be very enjoyable to write, which is, I guess, my question. He looks, so this is lamb, he looks down at Standish's shoes and says nice boots.

And Stanjish says all these years, and I don't believe I've ever heard you comment on anything I've been wearing, are you developing a footwear fetish? Because all of the characters have their own sort of spiky sense of humour. And then he goes, is that when you get a shoe horn? I mean, just a round of applause. Just round of applause. I remember that was one of the jokes that do happen where I have the joke and I write it down and then I just find a place. Well, there we go.

She worn it in. That makes me feel better about it because as someone who works in comedy for a living, it's very hard. And you don't want to believe that someone's just writing it just sort of comes out of their fingers. And you go, oh, yeah, that's a joke. So it's a really good joke and you find a place, a shelf for it. Yeah. And they're essentially, they're just malapropisms. I mean, it goes way, way back.

I suppose the added bit is that he always knows what he's doing and there's a reason for it. So when they occur, it's a lovely moment when one of those occurs to me. They don't normally happen in the flow of writing. You know, they are things that will occur to me when I'm out and about and the mind is doing what it does, you know, and you see a phrase written down somewhere and jump to the next level. And I have to jot them down. The one line of comedians quite often, they'll have books of idioms

because when you're dry, that's what will help. It's like you'll take something like a bird in the hand is worse, you know, two in the bush, and you just keep turning it. backwards and forwards. And so, because we all know those things and it's so enjoyable to have them messed around with. Yeah, it's taking something that's very well known and just, if you can just shift a letter or transpose two of the words and it becomes something entirely different. That's where, that's a rich seem to mind. So you don't enjoy a reading.

God, no. Right. I do when I'm working on them. When I'm working on them, editing the book, I mean, doing my own self-editing is fun. I love that bit. Putting something down on a blank page, that's hard. Taking something that's already been written and trying to make it better, that's fun. And that's the craft. I mean, art is the first draft and that's the only point I think where the art really comes into it. The rest of it is craft.

It's refashioning what you've done, working out how to make it. Looking at the jokes, I mean, a joke, you'll know far better than I do. It's far funnier, the fewer syllables it's got in it. If you can do a punchline in five syllables, that's great. If the same punchline takes ten syllables, then it's got half the impact. And so all that sort of stuff is the craft And I enjoy that part of it Yeah

I enjoy all of it But there's a certain amount of information That the listener or hero needs to have To make a joke makes sense But if it's too much it's not a joke It's yeah On panel shows Quite often if they're news-based

You have to tell people the news story Before you can say the joke And quite often usually what would happen Is one person gets the boring job of Oh so the Queen was in Ireland this week Because it's her 75th birthday And then by the time time you've done that, the audience are fed up of you talking.

And then someone else does a gag, but someone has to, first of all... Yeah, the setup. Yeah, the setup for it. What's your writing day like? Like, are you very disciplined? You get up and get straight to that desk? Yes and no. I have a routine. I aim to be... My working day is sort of nine to five, but it's really more like 10 to four. Oh, lovely. In that space, any work I do will be done in that space, really.

And I work in a place that I don't have Wi-Fi and... and my writing place. So I don't get distracted by doing emails or anything like that. But during that day, I mean, I will read. I mean, that's my reading time as well as my writing time. It's my napping time. God, you're making it sound absolutely brilliant. And I listen to music while I'm working.

Even, yeah, still sounds great, Mick. Yeah, I mean, when I was working, when I had an actual job per living and I was commuting into London and back, I would get home. I started early in the day. I tried to get to my office at 8 in the morning, so I had a very early start. I'd be home by about six. I had about an hour and a quarter of energy in me before I had to, you know, each go to bed, get up and do it all over again.

During that hour and a quarter, I would aim to write 350 words. And that was fine because I'd had two train journeys, plus, you know, a day of my desk, to think about what I was going to be doing, you know, my real stuff when I got home. So I always knew what those, always. I mean, I mostly knew what those 350 words are going to involve. Now I've got all the time in the world, but of course that I have to incorporate the brooding time, the thinking time, into that day. I'm perfectly happy if I get 500 words a day done now, even though I theoretically have much more time. Again, that's Hemingway's aim.

It's 500 words a day. Yeah, I think, because some people can. They are real sort of, you know, wordsmiths about it. Again, that craft thing of like the plodding of like, you just put it one in front of the other and then you've got something to edit the next day. Some people can do 2,000. but 500 every day or, you know, a few times a week adds up. Yeah, that adds up, doesn't it? It's a bit like exercise, doesn't it?

If you do 10 minutes a day rather than like two hours every week. This is what I tell myself as well, a 15 minute hit session in the morning. Yeah, yeah. It's better than not doing anything. Not working brilliant, but it's not doing that. So to come back to Farts. Oh, yeah. There's something here.

I mean, whether it's research. It must be, if you made it up, be very naughty. Because this is, I was on a train and I was going to. read it out to people. Okay. Apparently, when the door is opened on a long haul flight, anyone standing outside waiting to greet a passenger, gets two tons of fart in their face,

several hundred people's worth of body, odour, bad breath and belly aches. I was told this by the director of one of the series, Saul. And he was delighted that I put it in the book. Yes. I mean, it has the Ring of Truth. It makes sense. They don't open windows on airspace. They don't.

There's a sort of a system which makes the air. They recycles the air. Yeah, cyclical. So yes. There was a good recording on... But it's so gradual that if you're there on the flight, you don't notice. Yes, it just builds up, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But if you're there waiting. And then you're getting this like... And so do you know what the director's source was? Has he ever greeted anyone or she? He was told it by a greeter, I believe. I didn't care about his source, to be honest. As soon as I heard it, I thought I'm having that. Yeah, it's brilliant.

There's something sort of, I don't know, medieval or Shakespearean about his ability to weaponise his farts in the same way that someone might use their words to end a sentence, he can like, fart with the situation. Or a percussionist would go, do you don't, ting? Yeah. It reminds me of like gastromancy. Did you ever hear about gastromancy? No.

Oh, Ken Campbell used to talk about this about, I'm going to get this wrong now from what time period, but it was people who could, like, would say that they could conjure spirits up their ass, and then they would, like, fart, and it would sound like ghosts. So it was all kind of this, it was like an old skill in the way, like ventriloquism or gas, and it was like there was a time when people believed,

it was spirits and it was a very magical way to communicate with the debt was through your ass. And he was trying to get people in the 20th century to rekindle the joy of gastromacy. If I was known that 15 years ago, it would have been there in the first. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ken Campbell was given, you know, so like the most famous person, I guess is Nina Conte who he suggested to do ventriloquism. Yes. But a lot of the school of night could do like they reciting. They do the sonnets.

They do the sonnets. No, sevens. So it's what Marlowe is supposed to have done that he counted backwards in sevens from, I think, 777 whilst composing a sonnet. So there were improvisers who used to do this. Shaw McCann was one of the ones who I saw do it repeatedly and had to stop doing it because it would break his brain after a show. But the idea is you're using the left side and the right side of your brain at the same

time, which is what Marlow believed was like the ultimate test. So I was imagining that as well as that he was showing it. And then if you can just learn to fart, it was very linked with the ventriloquism because they would also make noises with their stomach. And it would like, so people would go on stage. and do this in like, you know. The possibility that he made all this up just to create mischief. I mean, I wouldn't put it past him.

He was that kind of man. But I think there are records of people using gastromancy to conjure spirits. I think it's Victorian. It's the time of like believing that, you know, there's another world. And we can, we can contact them through Ouija boards or mediums or our stomach gases. Yeah. Well, I'm relieved. I mean, I sometimes think that I might have overused them.

I've obviously underutilized it. You, Jackson Lamb, would have been a gasham answer in his time. Do you have a favourite lamb joke? I often find that the jokes I like are the ones that I suspect a lot of readers won't necessarily get, not because it would go over their heads, but because it is somewhat below their level, I suppose. There's a line in, I think it's in Real Tigers where Lamb is having a conversation with Ingrid Turney. And Ingrid Turney is tasking the slow horses with some mission or other. And she says, I think the phrase I'm looking for is horses for courses.

And Lamb says, yes, I know they do. Now, both my American and British proofreaders questioned this, they said, it's a complete non-sequitur. Is there a line missing or something? I thought, no, if you say horses for courses over again a few times quite fast. Horses fuck horses. You get where he's coming from. I wouldn't have got it.

And I would hope most people wouldn't. I mean, my mother reads these books. I know most people don't get. Yeah. But what happens sometimes is that you then go, oh, hang on, I know he's made a joke. Okay, yeah. When he's done those kind of non-sequiters, I wondered how fun that was for you to imagine, because there's a scene, there's a couple of scenes in this book where he's fixing his socks with duct tape. That's not a spoiler. Is that fun to imagine up what would lamb be doing? No, that's great. What happened was that, I think I'm able to tell the story, I'm sure I am.

Gary, Gary Oberman sent me a photograph of his, his father-in-law's socks, and his father-in-law had mended his socks with a piece of duct tape. He said, wasn't that fantastic? And again, I thought, yeah, I'm having that. Yeah, now it's in the book. So that's a little tribute to you. Oh, that's brilliant. Because I was imagining you sort of sitting there thinking, okay, so what can I,

how can I bring him to life here? What haven't we seen him do before? But, God, that's so, sort of so meta-textual. Indeed. A relative of the actor plays Daxon Lamb was influencing. Yeah, then putting things back into a book for things his character hasn't done yet. Wow. And you heard it here first.

There's a thesis here. Yeah, definitely there is. Mick, thank you so much for talking to us. So Clown Town is the ninth of the Slough House. It's out on September 11th. That might be out now. And fans of the TV show, well, number one, if people are listening haven't watched the TV show, you must watch the TV show. But you also must read the books because I watched the TV show and they went back to the books. And so it doesn't stop you enjoying them. The books exist in their own right. And they're a good gap to fill when you want something to binge. And your TV's off. And then the new Zoe ones are out to watch soon and then you can read them before it's even come out. Yeah, so you can just constantly be absorbing Mick Herron content. That's what you want, right, Mick? Up to your point.

Carly and Sarah, thank you both so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to The Weirdo's Book Club. Clown Town is out on the 11th of September. Run and get it. My new children's book, Where Did She Go? A Picture Book About Grief for Children is also available to buy now. And I'm on tour. I'm coming to a town near you. Don't you dare not come. Dickets for my show. I am a strange glooper on sale from sarahpasco.com. You can find out all about the upcoming books we're going to be discussing this series on our Instagram. At Sarah and Carrie has Weirdo's Book Book Club Club Club. We love recommendations. Send them our way. And please do join our Patreon. You know we like to gossip. You know we like to chat. On the Patreon, it's more gossip and more chat. Behind the scenes videos when we go to book events and then we don't want to be there and we do videos there. If you listen to the podcast, you think, oh my God, they've gone off on a tangent. Imagine how tangential saw it.

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