Literary Birthday – 11 July – Mick Herron

Happy Birthday, Mick Herron, born on 11 July 1963.

Mick Herron Quotes

1. When a book’s unwritten, it’s perfect. Starting to write it means accepting that you’re going to mess up again. (Harrogate)
2. A lot of the process involves mulling and musing, and even the actual writing is often a matter of staring at a screen rather than resorting to the keyboard. But however busy or otherwise I appear to be, I’m only those things between the hours of 10 and 4. The rest of the time, I’m off duty. (Harrogate)
3. I wanted to write about a bunch of people who were forced to work together who were thwarted by life and having a terrible time with their careers. (Wikipedia)
4. I wanted to have a larger cast of characters than I’d been used to (my Oxford-set mystery series focused on one or two individuals); I wanted to write about failures, rather than super-efficient heroic types; I wanted to write about political shifts and national situations rather than the domestic. (MickHerron)
5. When plotting a novel, I simply look at what’s going on in the world and slightly bend it to my own use. And however dim a view I take, events generally conspire to make me think I should have bent it more. (MickHerron)
6. I used to think that the humor of the books largely resides in the characters and their reactions to situations, and in the dialogue, particularly when they’re squabbling. Lately, I’ve come to realize that there’s also humor, of a particularly grim nature, to be found in poking away at those scary sociopolitical matters you mention. This could be described as satire, if you’re feeling generous. (MickHerron)
7. It’s a privilege to have a readership, and the existence of that readership has brought big changes in the past few years. What makes me happiest, though, is what hasn’t changed, which is the pleasure I still take in the work itself. So far, every book has brought a new set of challenges, and completing each has left me eager to start the next. (MickHerron)
8. Be lucky … It’s sad but true that there are any number of stratagems you can adopt in order to be a better writer, all to do with craft and practice and patience, but to be successful, you have to be lucky. Like all the best advice, of course, this is easy to give; hard to act on. (TLS)

Mick Herron is an award-winning British mystery and thriller writer. Raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, Herron studied English Literature at Oxford, where he continues to live. He is best known for the Slough House novels. The series was adapted into the TV show Slow Horses. He is also the author of the highly acclaimed standalone novels Nobody Walks and The Secret Hours. Herron won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 2013 for Dead Lions. In 2025, he received the Diamond Dagger, the association’s lifetime-achievement award. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024. Follow him on Facebook.

Source for photograph: TimDuncan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MickHerron2018.png

by Amanda Patterson
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