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Slow Horses author Mick Herron has revealed that he knows how Jackson Lamb dies.
The irascible, unkempt cold war-era spy heads up Slough House, the crumbling office for failed MI5 agents at the centre of Herron’s bestselling series.
“I do know how, why, when and where Jackson Lamb dies,” he told an audience at a Guardian Live event with Richard Osman at Cadogan Hall on Tuesday evening, hosted by Alex Clark.
“Wow, mind absolutely … cancel all questions. Wow,” Osman said in response. “I assumed he was never going to die. This is terrible news.”
Herron said that he figured out the character’s fate “relatively recently”. Asked what that moment was like, the author said that “like most plot elements, it was just solving a problem, I thought ‘Oh, that’s how that could be done’”.
The fifth season of the Apple TV+ adaptation, starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, begins streaming today. The ninth full-length novel in the Slough House series, Clown Town, was published earlier this month.
Osman, meanwhile, will publish a new book in the Thursday Murder Club series, The Impossible Fortune, this week. The first book in the series, which is about a group of residents from a retirement facility who band together to solve crimes, was adapted for film and released last month.
Osman’s series “has an awful lot in common” with Slough House in the sense that it’s about “a group of people who were high-powered and now find themselves sidelined”, said Osman. Underdogs “are incredibly useful to write about”.
Osman said he sees the adaptation – which stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie – as a “grandchild rather than a child”.
“When you watch something, you think, ‘Oh I would have done that differently’, but I would have done everything differently, and my version would have been so long and boring,” said Osman.
The author added that he knew in advance that Imrie was lined up to appear on The Celebrity Traitors that airs in October as he was asked by the production team whether she “would be good”, to which he responded that she would be “unbelievably good”.
Osman said he is 4,000 words in to a follow-up to We Solve Murders. “Mick will tell you that’s about the worst place you can be as a writer. Better to be zero words in or 80,000 words. Oh my God it’s a nightmare. How am I ever going to finish it? It seems an impossibility.” The second book will be set in Italy, and should be out next September.
Talking about how he solves plot problems, Herron said: “There comes a point when you’re aware that this has happened before, and you got out of it then, and it will all be OK, you just allow the back part of your brain to do the work.” He will sometimes write down problems and “just go and do something else, and at some point – 24, 48, 72 hours later – the answer just pops into your head”.
Osman and Herron also discussed their respective cats. Osman’s cat Lottie walks on the keyboard while he’s writing – in one instance deleting a paragraph of a novel. Meanwhile, Herron said his cat, Tommy, “helps me write emails”.
