New Apple TV Plus series Slow Horses has now started airing, with the show exploring the seedy underbelly of Britain’s intelligence services.
The drama features a star-studded cast including Gary Oldman, Dame Kristin Scott Thomas, Jack Lowden, Olivia Cooke, Saskia Reeves and Jonathan Pryce, and focuses on Slough House, a dumping ground department for failed MI5 agents.
However, just what is Slow Horses based on and is there more still to come from this spy thriller series?
Read on for everything you need to know about the Slow Horses books.
Is Slow Horses based on a book?
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You bet it is. The series is based on the novel of the same name by Mick Herron, which was first released in 2010.
The novel is the first in the Slough House series, a long-running collection of books featuring the brilliant but irascible Jackson Lamb, who’s played here by Gary Oldman.
How many books are there in the Slough House series?
There are currently seven books in the Slough House series, with an eighth coming out on 10th May 2022. The first season of Slow Horses is based on the first book in the series, while a second season based on the second book, Dead Lions, is also in the works.
Here’s the full list of Slough House novels in order.
- Slow Horses (2010)
- Dead Lions (2013)
- Real Tigers (2016)
- Spook Street (2017)
- London Rules (2018)
- Joe Country (2019)
- Slough House (2021)
- Bad Actors (2022)
Alongside the eight novels, Herron has also written three novellas in the series – The List (2015), The Drop (2018) and The Catch (2020).
Meanwhile, Herron’s novels Reconstruction (2008) and Nobody Walks (2015), while not officially part of the series, take place in the same world and include some of the same characters.
Does Jackson Lamb feature in all of the novels?
Lamb appears in all of the Slough House novels, meaning there should be plenty of scope for Gary Oldman to return as the character time and again. However, in an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com, Oldman recently revealed that Herron hadn’t always intended it to be that way.
Oldman explained how Herron had told him: “Lamb was never originally going to appear. Lamb was up somewhere on the eighth floor, or the seventh floor or somewhere in the building and that he was such a sort of legend that people talked about him, but he never appeared.
“And Mick said that he wrote one scene with Lamb and once he gave him the voice, he went, ‘Oh no, this guy’s too interesting,’ and that’s how the whole thing shifted. Which is fascinating to me that he was going to be an off-stage character.”
Will the Apple TV Plus series adapt more of the books?
When the series was first announced, Deadline reported that 12 episodes were being shot, with the latter six focusing on the second novel, Dead Lions.
As for whether the series will return beyond that to adapt further books, only time will tell.
The first two episodes of Slow Horses are streaming on Apple TV Plus now, with the third set to drop on 8th April 2022, with new episodes following weekly – you can sign up to Apple TV Plus here.
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