Before Slow Horses, there was Down Cemetery Road: Mick Herron’s first novel gets the TV treatment

The surprising thing about Down Cemetery Road, the new adaptation of Mick Herron’s first novel, is that it took so long to happen after Slow Horses, now in its fifth series.

It wasn’t even a grand plan. Scriptwriter Morwenna Banks, one of the Slow Horses writers, was working on something else when she idly looked at the flyleaf of one of Herron’s books on her desk, where his earlier books were listed.

“I saw Down Cemetery Road and thought, ‘Hmm, who’s adapting that? No one, I hope,’” she tells the audience at the series’ premiere screening. “So then I can do it!”

Two years later – the twinkling of an eye, says Herron, compared with the eight years it took to get Slow Horses moving – we’re here.

Down Cemetery Road centres on Sarah Trafford, the increasingly estranged wife of an ambitious banker, whose life suddenly becomes more colourful when a house not far from theirs explodes into flames. A couple die in the blast, while their small child survives and is taken to hospital. The next day, however, when Sarah goes to the hospital with a get-well card drawn by her best friend’s children, the girl seems to have disappeared.

Sarah doesn’t know the family. Even so, she is consumed with worry about this new orphan and, on an impulse, hires a private detective to track her down. Along with Zoe, the hard-bitten sleuth played by Emma Thompson, she is soon swept up in a whirl of murder, deception and deep state thuggery.

Ruth Wilson plays Sarah. “She’s interesting to explore,” Wilson says. “Mick’s written a character who doesn’t belong in this genre; she’s like a you or me who suddenly finds herself in an episode of a crime thriller and gets quite excited about it.”

Sarah can be combative, but she has no confidence. “She’s quite a lost character; she doesn’t know herself. That’s actually quite hard to play, so I just leaned into it. I leaned into her being lost and the fact she’s out of her depth and that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. Because I didn’t know what I was doing, either. And I found her as I went on.”

What she realised, says Wilson, was that Sarah had an ingrained habit of deference. “It became clearer to me in the dynamics of the characters. Oh, so she’s co-dependent! She latches on to people because she’s not confident in her own choices and doesn’t value herself, so she hangs on to other people’s opinions. But she’s also incredibly brave.”

The greatest puzzle was her commitment to finding a child she had never met, but that piece also fell into place as Wilson immersed herself in the story. “I think it’s something about the kid, but it’s also about what’s back home for her. Not much. So I think this has given her more purpose than anything in her life. It’s making her explore who she has tucked away, the wild eccentric woman she really is.”

Until she unearths that woman, however, she remains a beta to Zoe’s storming alpha. Thompson plays Zoe with spiky hair and a smashed-up leather coat the costume designer found in a bin sale. “She chucked it at me,” Thompson tells the premiere audience. “And I said, ‘That’s the jacket, all I need now is a knock-off pair of Doc Martens’ – not real ones, mind – and that was it, I was transported back to Camden Town, where I went to school.”

She imagined Zoe would have grown up in those “gritty, grimy streets” of ’70s London. “She’s a punk renegade; she has decided not to be a good girl,” she says. “She’s decided not to try not to take up too much space. She’s very capable of being fantastically rude.”

As a huge fan of Herron’s thrillers, Thompson had signed up to the project without a second’s hesitation. It was only after they started filming, she jokes, that she read to the point where she realised later episodes involved jumping into the freezing Irish Sea and – worse – a close encounter with rats.

Mick Herron’s novel has been significantly changed in the process of adaptation, partly to bring it up to date with technology – mobile phones, for example, scotched several original plot points – and partly because life has changed. In the book, Sarah didn’t work and spent her days inventing household tasks to stay sane, while Zoe was a relatively minor character. In the television version, Sarah has a job as an art restorer, but is frustrated by her expertise being ignored by her male superiors. Zoe, meanwhile, has moved front and centre; it is the sparring between these two women that gives the story its comic energy.

Herron, who worked closely with the scriptwriters, is more than happy with these changes. “You have to remember this novel was written 30 years ago,” he says, speaking by Zoom from his home in Newcastle, in north-eastern England. “It feels as if it were written by somebody else, almost. I have a deep attachment to it as my first novel, but I don’t feel possessive of it.”

Actually, he says, he feels the same way about Slow Horses. “I think that once I’ve delivered a novel and other people are reading it, it’s out there and I’m working on something new. I’m quite happy about it being up for grabs.”

What surprised him more was how much he has enjoyed collaborating with scriptwriters and directors. “Because I’m not collaborative. When I write a book, I don’t talk to anybody about it,” he says. “So it has surprised me that I enjoy kicking ideas around and seeing what happens.”

He is equally unbothered by the fact the actors in Down Cemetery Road don’t look anything like the characters he described. Interiority is always his focus. “I don’t really see characters when I’m writing about them,” he says. “I’m seeing through their eyes rather than seeing them. I have their voices in my head. I’m dealing with vocabulary and language. It’s always been that way for me.”

It is Sarah’s voice – or her silences, covering a maelstrom of thoughts and feelings – that drives his narrative. Her character – diffident but stroppy, as embodied by Wilson – remains just as he wrote her. Herron had no hesitation about taking a woman’s point of view.

“It just seemed more interesting to me,” he says. “I don’t write in the first person, but obviously I enter the consciousness of that character, and it was a way of writing about myself, without anyone thinking I was writing about myself. A lot of her feelings, opinions and attitudes are mine, or how I thought I would feel if I were a woman in her circumstances. She’s probably the most autobiographical character I’ve ever created.”

What is different is the relationship between the women. Sarah has an intensity Wilson readily admits probably comes from her. “I’m an intense person. But I don’t know if I look for intense characters,” she says.

Part of the appeal of Down Cemetery Road for her, in fact, was its light touch. “It’s quite irreverent,” she says. “It’s not an earnest show with two women talking about men and their emotions.” Instead, it’s a road movie with guns, bodies and car chases. “You don’t often see two lead females clashing and uniting in a sort of shared mission,” Wilson says. “This is Sarah’s massive fantasy and she’s loving it. And the joy of doing that – of doing action scenes with Emma Thompson. That was quite fun. That was great.”