Posted in: Apple, TV | Tagged: Slow Horses

Slow Horses: Mick Herron Already Knows When Jackson Lamb Will Die

Slow Horses author Mick Herron shocked fans at a Guardian chat event when he revealed he's already plotted out when Jackson Lamb would die.

As the fifth season of Apple TV+'s Slow Horses premieres, so does the PR push with interviews with the actors galore, but nothing beats author and creator Mike Herron publicly declaring he has already planned out how Jackson Lamb will die. Did he tell Gary Oldman, who has said he would happily make Lamb his final role before retiring from acting?

"I do know how, why, when, and where Jackson Lamb dies," he said at a Guardian Live event with The Thursday Murder Club author Richard Osman at Cadogan Hall on Tuesday evening, hosted by Alex Clark. "Wow, mind absolutely … cancel all questions. Wow," Osman said, flabbergasted. "I assumed he was never going to die. This is terrible news."

Herron said that he figured out Jackson Lamb's fate "relatively recently," since "like most plot elements, it was just solving a problem, I thought 'Oh, that's how that could be done'. 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".

Eagle-eyed book readers of the Slow Horses novels will have noticed that at the end of the last story, "Bad Actors," Lamb began to idly think about his exit strategy from Slough House and the Intelligence Service altogether, possibly by faking his death. Even a lifer like Lamb can watch all the betrayals, disillusionment, and bad faith and decide enough is enough. He was also becoming each book's deus ex machina, where the slow horses spend most of the plot running around trying to find out what's going on, only for Lamb to come and say he's already sussed out exactly what's going on and who the bad guy is. Some readers thought Herron might be starting to burn out on the character and was already beginning to plan Lamb's end. Now Herron has confirmed it.

Slow Horses premieres this week on Apple TV+. The latest novel, "Clown Town," is now out.

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