‘Down Cemetery Road’ Author Mick Herron Explains Major Change to [Spoiler]’s Death

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Down Cemetery Road Season 1 Episode 1 “Almost True” and 2 “A Kind of Grief.”]

As one Apple TV series based on Mick Herron’s books ends a season (Slow Horses, its fifth, with two more already on the way), another premieres. Down Cemetery Road, in its first two episodes, introduces Emma Thompson as private investigator Zoë Boehm and Ruth Wilson as art restorer Sarah Trafford, who becomes tangled up in a disappearance and conspiracy following an explosion in her neighborhood. The beginning of this series also sticks to events from the book on which it’s based, though there is a change to a significant death.

After the explosion, Sarah tries to visit the young girl who survived in the hospital, only to be denied access. That leads to her hiring a private investigator, Zoë’s husband Joe Silverman (Adam Godley), whose digging uncovers when the girl is set to be moved from the hospital. Sarah fails to intervene, and when she goes to see Joe at the end of the premiere, she finds him dead. It looks like a suicide. (It’s not.) That is straight from Herron’s pages, though it happens much earlier in the story (the first of eight episodes) compared to the book (about a third of the way through). While the author wasn’t part of that decision — he serves as an executive producer on the Apple TV drama — he sees why it works.

“Pacing is obviously a very important part of a series like this, and it was felt that that death would be such an unexpected shock to the viewers that it would be one that would automatically make them come back and see part two,” Herron tells TV Insider. “So, I think it was a good idea. The only drawback to it is that we don’t see quite enough of Joe, who’s beautifully played by Adam Godley. He’s a very endearing character and in a few short scenes, he does make himself very much an audience favorite, I thought, so it will come as a big shock, that final scene.”

The author shares that he invented the character for the book just to kill him. “It was one of the things that I knew would form the core of the book,” he explains. But he “missed” the character so much that he did something he hadn’t before and went back and wrote short stories about him, the Dolphin Junction collection. “The stories all start with a line something like, ‘Quite a long time ago, long before he died, Joe Silverman would, blah, blah blah.’ I missed the character a lot, but it’s a necessary thing to do when you’re writing thrillers. Sometimes you have to dispatch people occasionally. It’s not fun, but someone’s got to do it.”

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When Godley signed on, he hadn’t been too familiar with Herron’s books, though he had seen some of Slow Horses. “I know his particular kind of tone people really respond to. It’s a very kind of British, that kind of wry humor. There’s a darkness, there’s a kind of realness to it all, and his just crazy, eccentric, warts and all kinds of characters,” he said. “For actors, we love diving into those kind of roles.” He did know he was only going to be in the one episode and that his death would play a key role in the series’ theme: “The effect the dead have on the living, and he sets up Zoë’s emotional journey.”

With Joe onscreen for just a few scenes, the focus was on establishing his and Zoë’s relationship. It’s clear from their brief interactions that she doesn’t seem to think much of him and he’s resigned to what’s come of their relationship. Herron agrees.

“They had a difficult relationship largely because of Joe’s immaturity and the fact that he was living a life where he was basically chasing a boyhood while Zoë is more down to earth and well aware of the practicalities of life and how Joe was not living up to them,” the author says. “That was always going to fracture their relationship. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t fond of each other.” But it was important to establish that there was an affection there to set up Zoë’s arc for the season, looking into his death because she knows it wasn’t suicide.
“Emma and I, all our work was on establishing a believable relationship. There’s difficulties in there. There’s awkwardness and some kind of darkness in a way,” shares Godley, who’s worked with Thompson in the past. “Emma, of course, is just a glorious, fantastic human being, and actor.”

Godley also agrees with the aforementioned assessment of what both Joe and Zoë think of one another. “Joe longs for it to get to a better place and he’s very much in love with Zoë,” he says. We see that when she’s plucking a hair from her face and he thinks she’s talking to him and is just so happy in that moment. “He’s an eternal optimist and living in hope and a certain amount of denial, probably,” Godley explains. “That moment is very symptomatic of he is always on the cusp of believing it could all turn to hearts and flowers again and that she really does love him. I think his sort of hope for it dominates the reality of the fact that she clearly is not into him in the way he’s into her.”

That’s why he’s hesitant when he asks where she’s going when he leaves (he doesn’t want to know about her affair) and welcomes her advice about his casework. “That is where they connect,” Godley says. “Although he seems pretty incompetent and her shtick towards him is that he’s useless and she’s the good one, he actually comes up with some pretty useful and good stuff. You’d like to think that’s what cemented their relationship in the first place, perhaps that they did have this in common, and she must have had some love and respect for him back in the day.”

Despite what had come of their relationship, Zoë will be grieving her loss. “I think that the grief is very well dealt with in the show,” says Herron. “I think that bringing Joe’s mother into it and seeing a little bit of Zoë’s relationship with her does an awful lot to flesh out that idea of Zoë grieving for her husband, even though their relationship had kind of come to an end. Nevertheless, she was still very angry and upset about his end.”

The series explores Zoë’s character in a deeper way than the book on which the first season is based does; the subsequent books in Herron’s series feature her as a major character. “It’s quite exciting to kind of retrofit, if you like, the character to Down Cemetery Road. She’s very much the character that I invented and Emma is playing her beautifully, so it’s nice to see more of her in that particular novel,” Herron tells TV Insider. “There’s nothing she does or nothing that she gets involved in that struck me as being different to how I would’ve done it had I made more of Zoë in that book.”

In the second episode, Sarah learns that her neighbor, Rufus (Ken Nwosu), was the one behind the explosion and who killed Joe and staged the scene. He then tries to kill her, only for Downey ( Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), who had been a mysterious, threatening figure up to that point, to burst into her house. The episode ends with a gunshot. This, too, plays out very similar as it does in the book. (Glimpses of Sarah in the trailer beyond what we’ve seen so far reveal she survives.)

“I’m very pleased to see it done that way,” Herron says. “When you’re starting to think about writing a thriller and you have a vague plot in mind, the concrete bits you have are particular scenes that come to mind that you think would work well. And that notion of having somebody whom everybody had dismissed and everybody thought was a completely inconsequential person turning out to be a vicious, almost psychopathic assassin was very appealing to me. And to play it out in that very domestic setting in the kitchen essentially, and to have the person who everybody assumed was the bad guy turn out to be the hero and turn up and rescue Sarah at that moment, I thought that would be a really nice turnaround in the plot of the book I was writing, and it works really well on the screen.”

It was Joe’s involvement in the mystery that got him killed. It wasn’t the typical case for him, and that’s why he  was “fully invested,” according to Godley. “From the get-go, nothing was what it appeared to be. That’s such a theme in the show, in the book: reality versus what’s true, what are lies? Are people dead? Is what you’re seeing real? What is the truth? And that’s the core of being a detective, is trying to uncover the truth. And this is such a knotty and extraordinary situation.”

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Joe also saw a “kindred spirit” in Sarah when they spoke when she first approached him. “She’s got so much of a detective in her — her job is being an art detective — so I think he responded to that,” Godley explains. It was also “flattering” that she “took him seriously, as opposed to Zoë.”

He adds, “Ruth is so extraordinary, and she’s so riveting and watchable in this. You’re just there with every thought. You can’t take your eyes off her.”

As for what he thinks Joe would want his legacy to be, “resolution of this case,” says Godley. “I think that means everything to him, uncovering the truth.”

What did you think of the first two episodes of Down Cemetery Road? Did you read Mick Herron’s book on which it’s based? Let us know in the comments section below.

Down Cemetery Road, Wednesdays, Apple TV