In Herron’s world, nothing succeeds like failure

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This article was published 01/11/2025 (305 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

British novelist Mick Herron has become a late-in-life success by writing about failure.

He’s the man behind Apple TV+’s hugely popular Slow Horses, as well as a new series, Down Cemetery Road (with episodes streaming on Wednesdays). Based on an early Herron book, this eight-episode thriller follows cynical, acerbic, perpetually broke private detective Zoë Boehm (Sense and Sensibility’s Emma Thompson).

There are some obvious overlaps with Slow Horses — mismanaged espionage operations, sinister government secrets, people who don’t get along being forced to share long car trips. But what really connects these two Herron series is a vibe.

Like Slow Horses, which follows the misadventures of a bunch of screw-up spies, Down Cemetery Road is profoundly loser-centric.

In Herron’s fictional worlds, it’s always the sad-sacks and the stragglers, the hapless and the hopeless versus the smooth, the slick and the powerful. It’s the misfits and outsiders versus the people who went to the same schools and the same colleges, who belong to the same clubs and sit on the same boards. It’s the rumpled anoraks versus the Savile Row suits. Always, always, Herron sides with the underdogs.

Down Cemetery Road starts with a dinner party in an Oxford suburb that’s so comically mismatched and uncomfortable that when a bomb goes off down the street, it’s almost a relief — certainly for the audience and possibly even for the dinner-party guests.

The explosion is explained away, at least officially, as some problem with the gas mains. But a child has somehow gone missing, and Sarah Trafford (The Affair’s Ruth Wilson), the dinner-party host, gets drawn into a plot involving a deep, dark cover-up at the Ministry of Defence.

Sarah hopes to get some help from Oxford Investigations, a down-market private detective outfit run by Joe Silvermann (Adam Godley of The Umbrella Academy) and his almost-ex-wife Zoë. The office is messy and cluttered and shabby, with a thick layer of dust on the Rolodex. But Joe insists the firm can handle anything — “runaway teens, credit checks, missing tortoises.”

Zoë ends up as lead investigator, and she and Sarah — plus a shifting round of enemies and allies — are soon converging on a remote Scottish island, hoping to find the missing child.

Thompson is just fabulous, an intriguing mix of dry humour and deep emotional wounds. While her character certainly showers more often than Slow Horses’ unkempt, odorous Jackson Lamb, she shares some of his “no effs to give” attitude and penchant for acid commentary.

“Does everything you say have to be really horrible?” Sarah asks at one point.

Zoë also looks great. With her spiky silver hair and black-leather-forward wardrobe, she clearly developed a signature look some time in the 1980s and stuck to it. (And it works.)

The good guys in Down Cemetery Road don’t have much. They mostly get by on humour, persistence and ingenuity.

In one simultaneously tense and funny scene, Zoë gets out of a potentially fatal situation by playing an impromptu game of Bananagrams with some passing tourists. At another point, Zoë is looking at CCTV footage of what could be a murderer and asks her amateur assistant to zoom in. Well, they don‘t actually have the tech for that, he explains, “But we can zoom in … with our eyes.”

Meanwhile, we have the bad guys.

Herron occasionally casts a satirical eye on middle-class liberals “with your Farrow & Ball life, your kimchi and your Nutribullet and your bland but undeniably tasteful scatter cushions.” But his real ire is reserved for Britain’s insular upper-class elites.

The baddies in Down Cemetery Road have exquisite offices — all mahogany panelling and marble floors and elaborate tea services. The head baddie, known only as C. (Trying’s Darren Boyd), is extremely well-tailored and also extremely tall, so we often see him literally — as well as figuratively — looking down his nose at people.

He has gleaming black SUVs and helicopters and even a few off-book assassins on call. He’s callous, competent, controlled and — like almost everyone above a certain pay grade in the Mick Herron universe — he’s absolutely ghastly.

Herron’s disdain for England’s powerful, his loyalty to the powerless, might be partly political. Slow Horses character Peter Judd, described as “a toxic clown,” is based partly on former Tory prime minister Boris Johnson. It could be partly personal — the 62-year-old Herron struggled for years to launch his writing career.

But as Herron has said in interviews, he just finds failure more interesting than success. With empathy for human weakness and skepticism about institutional authority, it’s an approach that has a lot of resonance in 2025. And it’s through this sometimes funny, sometimes poignant look at failure that Down Cemetery Road — paradoxically — succeeds.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca