‘Slow Horses’ Author Mick Herron Revisits First Novel ‘Down Cemetery Road’ for Apple TV Adaptation

The newest ebook edition of Slow Horses author Mick Herron‘s novel Down Cemetery Road begins with a foreword by Emma Thompson. She recalls first coming across one of Herron’s books on a London bookstore’s “staff recommends” shelf and tearing through it, after which “I instantly read the rest of his work,” she writes.

Thompson is now starring in an Apple TV series based on Down Cemetery Road, and Herron says he’s delighted the Oscar and Emmy winner signed on to the series.

“She was certainly very enthusiastic when she heard that it was being made,” Herron tells The Hollywood Reporter of Thompson’s involvement; in addition to playing private investigator Zoë Boehm, Thompson is also an executive producer. “And obviously, she’s been an absolutely wonderful Zoë. But yes, it turns out that she had read the books beforehand, both these books and the Slow Horses books, so she knew what she was being asked to do, if you like, and was very enthusiastic about it. I can’t express how lucky I feel that this came to pass.”

Down Cemetery Road, which premiered Wednesday on Apple TV, kicks off with a house exploding in a neighborhood in Oxford, England, that kills two occupants but leaves a little girl alive. A neighbor, Sarah Trafford (Ruth Wilson), wants to help the girl but finds herself picking at the edges of a conspiracy involving a military cover-up. She enlists Zoë’s help, and the two women — both separately and together —try to both find the girl and unravel just why so many people are trying to keep them from doing so.

Down Cemetery Road is Herron’s first novel, published in 2003. He wrote three more books featuring Zoë and Sarah before beginning the Slough House series of spy novels. Those books, now numbering eight (plus several novellas), have been adapted as Apple TV’s Emmy-winning series Slow Horses, whose fifth season concluded Wednesday (Apple has ordered two more seasons).

Herron, who’s also an executive producer of Down Cemetery Road, spoke with THR about revisiting his first novel, how involved he gets in adapting his work and the possible futures for both the new series and Slow Horses.

I’m curious what it’s been like for you to revisit your first novel in the process of the show getting made.

It was a very happy experience, which wasn’t something I necessarily took for granted. This book was published in 2003, but I started writing it a good six or seven years before that. So it’s a long time ago now, 30 years, and it does feel like I was a different person when I wrote it. I was certainly living a different sort of life, and I did wonder whether it would stand up to anything, because I haven’t revisited it very often. But I was very, very happy with what the producers, the writers and the cast did. But also, I found that I look back on the book very fondly, because it was my first-born, as it were, but I wasn’t sure whether it would stand up to scrutiny. I think by and large, I’m still very happy with it.

How involved do you get in the adaptations of your work, and how often do you talk with, in this instance, [lead writer] Morwenna Banks and the other writers?

I spent time in the writers room, and I’m involved in the adaptation process, rather than the writing. I’m separating the two — when I say adaptation, I mean the business of changing the plot in order to make it into a TV show, right? I’m part of that process, and then the writers go off and do all the dialogue and so on. It was very straightforward and very enjoyable for me. I knew Morwenna well from having worked with her on Slow Horses, so I was delighted when this all started taking off and I knew that Morwenna was going to be the lead writer. And indeed, the whole experience has proved wonderful on those grounds. I talk to Morwenna a lot. She shows me the scripts. She’s very happy to listen to anything I have to say about them — I have very little to say about them because I think they’re terrific.

Since the book is set around the time it was published, what did you and the writers talk about in terms of bringing it into the present day?

It’s technically an historical novel now, I wrote it so long ago. There are a lot of the very obvious things — I don’t think any of my characters [in the book] had mobile phones, for instance. So all of that sort of thing has to be dealt with, which does make some situations very different. Politically as well, I suppose. The ‘90s were fairly different looking from the 2020s, so all of that had to be taken into account. But broadly speaking, the thriller works on two levels. One is the characters that are involved, and there’s not much change there. The other one is the idea of political skullduggery going on in the background. And I think that we can all quite easily take that as being a perfectly credible set of circumstances, that the government might be up to dark things that they’re not telling us about.

That certainly that doesn’t seem to change from era to era.

The world would be a much better place if I could say nothing like that could happen now, but it just seems more and more likely.

When you were writing Down Cemetery Road, did you have influences or other private eye characters in mind that you wanted to either emulate or move away from in creating Zoë?

I was more focused on creating Sarah when I wrote Down Cemetery Road than Zoë, who has a fairly minor role in this book. She came to the fore in later novels. I was very much trying to write my own book, but at the same time, one of my favorite writers then and now is the late Reginald Hill —he was still alive then. He wrote some wonderful thrillers under a pseudonym, Patrick Ruell. They were international thrillers, and there’s one in particular which was about a woman leaving a very ordinary life who suddenly finds herself involved in international wrongdoing. She gets caught up in something that she could never have imagined herself being part of. I took that as a kind of template for this book. I wanted to do something similar, because characters become interesting when they’re taken out of their natural context and put somewhere where they’re no longer at home, and you see how they cope with that.

When you’re adapting something, have you found that there are certain things that are harder to let go of than others? Whether it’s a picture in your head of a character, plot points, something else?

I’ve never had a problem with casting because I don’t really have pictures in my head of what the characters might look like. I’m very much a writer who works to the page. I have found that in almost every instance where I’ve been involved in an adaptation, the book that’s being adapted is something that is part of my past, and therefore I don’t feel that possessive about it. I’ve written it and it’s there on the shelf, and that’s my bit done. If the process of adapting it to the screen wreaks changes upon it, then I understand why that has to be done. For the most part, I think, “Yeah, this works as television in a way that the book wouldn’t.” I’ve been perfectly happy with it.

There are four books in the Zoë Boehm series. Are you hopeful that Apple will want to keep going and adapt the subsequent ones?

What I’m mostly hoping at the moment is that Down Cemetery Road gets the reception that it deserves from viewers. And if that happens, then the road will be wide open. But for the moment, I’m focusing on how the next few weeks are going to go. Advance signs are very, very promising, I have to say.

With the show coming along now, is there any temptation for you to check in on Zoë and Sarah in the present?

I never really said goodbye to these characters, because when I had written what is currently the final Zoë novel [2009’s Smoke and Whispers], I then wrote Slow Horses. The intention after writing Slow Horses was to go back and write another Zoë novel, but I got sucked into the world of espionage and have stuck with that. But five or so years ago, I put together a collection of short stories, including three or four Zoë stories, some of which had been written since that final novel. I realized that I still haven’t properly said goodbye, so maybe I will go back and write more.

Slow Horses is finishing up its fifth season, and it’s been renewed for two more, but there are currently eight books in the main series. Have you had conversations with Apple and the producing team about taking it all the way to the end of what you’ve written thus far?

[Laughs] There are always conversations. We’ll see. The show has been getting more and more successful, it seems. Provided people are happy, who knows what’s going to happen?

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Down Cemetery Road is available now on Apple TV.