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Mick Herron either likes Slow Horses showrunner Will Smith very much, or not at all. Either way, Herron's been crafting challenges in his novels - writing scenes that are impossible to do on film, making their adaptations into Apple TV+'s Gary Oldman-starring spy thriller that much harder to create. But maybe he's not doing it on purpose? 

Herron revealed as much during a joint interview with Smith for Radio Times (and though we assume you've caught on by now - that's the Will Smith of The Thick of It fame, not the Fresh Prince). Ahead of the Slow Horses season 5 premiere, Smith spoke about adapting Herron's novel, London Rules, the fifth entry into the Slough House series upon which Slow Horses is based.

"In season 5," Smith said, "The challenge we had with that was Mick does a brilliant thing at the beginning where there's an attack, and he writes it, and you think you're somewhere in the Middle East, and then you reveal it’s Derbyshire, and that is brilliant. We cannot do that in the show."

Creditin his usage of vocabulary like "sand-colored" to pull off the trick, Herron said that, "I have found that in the books that I've written since the show was up and running - it might have been my subconscious at work - I've always included stuff that would be impossible to film."

"Thank you very much," Smith quipped back. But in a friendly way... right?

To be fair, Slow Horses and Slough House are both about intelligence services - mired in secrets, codes, and mysteries. Maybe Herron just has so much experience in those worlds that he naturally describes things you can't plug into an image generator.

Or, again, maybe he just hates Will Smith.

Slow Horses season 5 debuts on Apple TV+ September 24.

Just like yourself, the Popverse staff spends a whole lot of time with our respective noses in respective books. It's why we've come up with stuff like:

• The hottest upcoming fiction
• Queer romance to add to your reading list
• A reading guide to Cassandar Clare's Shadowhunter Chronicles

...and a whole lot more. Join our metaphorical library, won't you? There are no late fees and you can be as loud as you want, so long as the people you live with are OK with it.