Before he published his first spy novel, Slow Horses, and before Gary Oldman shuffled through Slough House in an irascible, flatulent haze, Mick Herron wrote Down Cemetery Road, about an Oxford private eye called Zoë Boehm. It was excellent, that mordant Herron narrative voice, so vital to the success of Slow Horses’ Apple TV adaptation, already permeating the pages.
Little wonder, then, his 2003 debut has now been given the Apple treatment. Emma Thompson plays the cynical, spiky-haired Boehm; Ruth Wilson is art restorer Sarah Tucker, who hires the investigator after her excruciating dinner party is abruptly ended by a gas main exploding on her quiet street. It’s adapted by Morwenna Banks, a scriptwriter on Slow Horses; the result is a detective-story-cum-adventure-yarn that grows on you the more the bodies pile up. Oxford hasn’t seen this many murders since Inspector Morse. Far from cosy Sunday-night fare, though, Down Cemetery Road is an increasingly nervy exercise in paranoia, an eight-part mystery that taps into the national mood of institutional distrust amid a fug of bureaucratic malaise. Some clever commissioning, that.
If you pick apart the story threads, yes, it is a little messy here and there, but it takes a special kind of alchemy to have such astringent oddball humour sit so comfortably next to an accretion of acts this grisly. Tonally, it really should be more jarring than it is. That it’s not has a lot to do with the lead performances. They are superb: Wilson conveys wide-eyed intensity with characteristic ease; Thompson is all brusque, unsympathetic energy as Boehm, called upon after Tucker’s attempt to deliver a card to a child injured in the blast drags her into a conspiracy.
There are cover-ups; shady government officials; a nefarious organisation. Offsetting all this is dialogue that crackles with arch, Herronian humour. Take this exchange between Zoë and her husband, Joe, played as if a kicked puppy by Adam Godley.
Zoë: “Nobody has used their Dictaphone since 1982.”
Joe: “No, you’re right. They used their finger.”
You could argue there’s something perversely anachronistic about a conspiracy thriller in 2025, when the global climate already feels like some kind of far-fetched nightmare. But be that as it may, I still found myself bingeing the whole lot, in thrall to the cast chemistry and a plot that has more twists than a politician’s expenses claim. Kudos to Banks, who has adapted Herron’s novel into something genuinely labyrinthine without it becoming incomprehensible. Slow Horses it may not be, but Down Cemetery Road is its own beast: faster, funnier and unrelenting.
