Stories Never Write Themselves: A Guest Post by Mick Herron

The worst smell in the world is dead badger – the opening words of The Secret Hours were spoken by my brother David as we were walking one of Devon’s green lanes. Thankfully I was able to take his word for it, as we encountered no badger corpses that day. But he had given me an opening for a scene I already had in mind, though I wasn’t sure where it would lead. Down those same green lanes, yes, with a man who’d been roused from his bed by unknown assailants. There’d be jousting (on motorbike, not horseback); there’d be a bulging garden wall tipped onto a road … My books generally begin their slow journey onto the page with an isolated scene on which everything else comes to depend, but it’s rare for that scene to be the opening. Usually it’s towards the end, giving me something to aim towards. Having a starting point but no destination is liberating, but not particularly helpful. If you want to arrive somewhere, it’s as well to know in which direction you should be heading.

Which required a pause for contemplation. For me, creativity is a dynamic process, by which I mean I do it best when actually doing it. Ideas can arrive out of the blue, but usually do so as isolated moments – let’s think of them as eggs. Eggs are fine, but if you’re after an omelette, you’ve work to do. In this instance I decided the best way to generate progress on a novel I wasn’t ready to start writing was to work on a short story instead, and see if that triggered momentum.

The story I had in mind was more scenario than plot, and was intended to form a bridge between my most recent novel, Bad Actors, and the next Slough House book. It would be a Christmas present to myself, because I enjoy a Christmas story, and would involve Jackson Lamb saying “Ho ho ho,” or rather “Ho. Ho! HO!” because summoning Roddy can take more than one attempt. It would reference one of the greatest of Christmas stories, It’s a Wonderful Life, by having Roddy Ho ponder what Slough House would be like if he had never existed, and to nudge him into such thoughts, he’d be doctoring a photograph – making a character disappear from history. And that photograph had to come from somewhere, and where better than the Regent’s Park archive, curated by Molly Doran, which meant that the photograph was from somewhere in someone’s past, possibly Molly’s own …

These notions came tumbling out once I’d started work. Stories never write themselves, and this one took me down a cul-de-sac or two, but by the time I’d finished it had helped spark other ideas, and I had a fair idea of who the man being chased down the green lane was, and where his flight would take him. This was something of a surprise to me – one of the few things I’d known about what would become The Secret Hours was that it wasn’t a Slough House novel – but once you’ve broken the eggs, you have to make the omelette. I hope readers enjoy the finished dish.