He’s been called the John le Carre of our generation and now spy thriller writer Mick Herron is having books from his Slough House series turned into a TV drama starring Oscar winner Gary Oldman.

Titled Slow Horses, it will air on Apple TV, starring Oldman as Jackson Lamb, an overweight, flatulent, boozing, politically incorrect but brilliant intelligence officer who ends up in MI5’s dumping ground because of his career-wrecking mistakes.

The show will also star Kristin Scott Thomas and Jonathan Pryce.

Mr Oldman won an Oscar nomination for his role as master spy George Smiley in the 2011 movie Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, an adaptation of John le Carre’s novel.

And in 2017 he won a Best Actor Oscar for Darkest Hour in which he played Winston Churchill.

There will be twelve 60-minute episodes of the series based on Mr Herron’s first two books in the series Slow Horses and Dead Lions – the latter won a major crime fiction prize the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award and was picked by The Sunday Times as one of the best 25 crime novels of the past five years.

Mr Oldman is currently tipped for another Oscar for his role in new movie Mank about alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as he races to finish the screenplay of Citizen Kane.

He said: “I’ll tell you what, to have been lucky enough to play Smiley in one’s career; and now go and play Jackson Lamb in Mick Herron’s novels – the heir, in a way, to le Carre – is a terrific thing.”

Mr Herron, who was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, studied English at Balliol College and has settled in Oxford, said: “I wasn’t involved in the casting of Gary Oldman but I can only assume he was impressed by the script, which I didn’t write. But obviously, yes, he’ll be brilliant.”

Praise has equally been showered on Mr Herron himself.

The Daily Express wrote in one review: “Witty, sardonic and laugh-out-loud funny yet also thrilling and thought-provoking... Herron has often been compared with spy thriller greats John le Carré and Len Deighton but it is time he was recognised in his own right as the best thriller writer in Britain today.”

Mr Herron is pleased and proud of the le Carre comparisons.

“I’m sometimes compared to le Carré, which is a hugely flattering comparison, but made largely because I’m working in the spy genre, and not because there’s any great similarity between us.

“His books include the finest spy novels ever written. The Smiley stories are his crowning glory, but A Perfect Spy, The Little Drummer Girl, Absolute Friends, are all, in their different ways, masterpieces.”

Other books he would recommend include “anything by Jonathan Coe, Clare Chambers, Barbara Vine, David Mitchell... Christopher Brookmyre – who also co-writes the Ambrose Parry novels – has a great new thriller out The Cut.

“And those seeking consolation could do worse than turn to the poetry shelves: I’d recommend Alice Oswald.”

In Mr Herron’s books Slough House is a decrepit building in London where washed-up spies go to while away what’s left of their careers.

The “slow horses”, as they are called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated there.

His latest book, which came out this month, refers to the 2018 novichok poisoning of Russian former agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury.

The plot concerns the “slow horses” being picked off after M15 launches a retaliatory hit on Russian soil.

Mr Herron said: “I was interested in imagining the kind of response my fictional intelligence service might make to a similar series of attempted and actual murders carried out by a foreign security agency on British soil.”

Mr Herron has also written an earlier mystery series set in Oxford, a location he chose simply because it’s where he lives.

He explained: “Any location can be a good one if the writer uses it well, and there have certainly been brilliant novels with an Oxford backdrop: Michael Dibdin’s Dirty Tricks and Lucy Atkins’ Magpie Lane come immediately to mind.

“The city also lends itself happily to being viewed in alternative versions, as Philip Pullman’s readers know.

“But there have also been very poor Oxford novels. Location is only as good as the writer makes it.”

His favourite things about the city are, “the river, the bookshops, the libraries, Port Meadow. A good number of the buildings.

“Many of my friends and all of my neighbours live here. It’s home. I have no current desire to live anywhere else.”

Mr Herron’s latest book Slough House (which is published by John Murray press) is out now.