Ava Glass thought she had made her first work friend. An American now living in London, she had just started her first job as a civil servant, working in counter-terrorism communications. She was waiting for security clearance when, one morning, about three weeks in, she got talking to a colleague in the kitchen. The woman was in her late 20s, and also new, she said. Glass showed her where the teaspoons were kept. A few days later, Glass ran into the woman again at her favourite cafe. “She was very curious about my background, my life, what my family did back in the US,” Glass recalls. “‘Your brother was in the military? How interesting!’ I just didn’t cotton on to it … Then she disappeared completely.”
Soon after, Glass learned that she had been granted her security clearance. But it was months until she realised the probable truth: that her “curious” colleague had in fact been Glass’s final background check. “She was my first spy.”
Now, 15 years later, she is embarrassed that it took so long for the penny to drop. “I felt like an absolute idiot,” she says. “I had underestimated her because she was a 28-year-old woman. Who would think that this young woman in knee-high boots, dressed just like me, helpless in the kitchen, could possibly be anything other than the legal assistant she said she was?”
The encounter revealed not just Glass’s own biases, but also the tip of the hidden networks and forces running through society. It is an experience she has channelled into writing spy fiction: her debut thriller, The Chase, was published in February to praise from leaders of the genre James Patterson and Anthony Horowitz. It was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award by the Crime Writers’ Association, while a television adaptation is in the works from the production company behind the BBC series The Night Manager. The Traitor, the follow-up in the same Alias Emma series, is published this month.
Both books follow Emma Makepeace, a promising young spy determined to serve her country and prove her worth in the face of frustrating office politics. Plot-wise, the books abide by the conventions of spy fiction. Where Glass is refreshing the genre is with her protagonist. Makepeace – declared by Patterson to be a “worthy heir to the James Bond mantle” – cuts neatly across the endless debate over modernising 007.
While researching The Chase, Glass went back to the classics: Fleming, John le Carré, Len Deighton, Graham Greene. While the Bond films can pass for camp and self-referential, the books are “much more bare on the page,” says Glass. She points, for instance, to a scene in Fleming’s Casino Royale that describes a sexual encounter as having “the sweet tang of rape”. “It’s so shocking, so brutal – and it’s so throwaway,” says Glass. “It genuinely made me put the book down and take a breath.”
She imagined Makepeace as a rejoinder to this – “a spy with intent”. Among the few female spies Glass uncovered in fiction, many had stumbled into the job, disregarding the competitive entry and all-consuming demands. “Women have always made the best spies,” says Glass. “Nobody expects us.”
Between her transatlantic disarming slang and knowing smile, Glass has the air of an international woman of mystery herself. “Ava Glass” is in fact one of a number of pseudonyms used by Christi (or CJ) Daugherty in her career traversing romance, fantasy and crime writing. (We agree to stick to Glass, for simplicity’s sake.)
Glass was born in Dallas, Texas. Her father was inclined to uprooting his family on a whim. “It was a slightly chaotic childhood,” Glass says. After her parents divorced, she and her two brothers lived with their mother in a rented flat. She grew up accustomed to a searching, somewhat itinerant, often cash-strapped way of life. Quiet and observant, she had the makings of a writer from a young age, but “it seemed to me that was something that you only did if you were rich,” she says.
Glass earned scholarships to become the first in her family to attend university. She started out studying business but switched to journalism after watching All the President’s Men. Her first job was as a crime reporter at the Savannah Morning News newspaper in Georgia – it was the farthest she had ever been from Texas. “I was terrified. I was only 21.”
She routinely attended as many as 10 shootings a night, driving herself from crime scene to crime scene. She was the paper’s first female crime reporter. “In a way I was lucky, because the police found this completely fascinating and wanted to talk to me,” she says. “I was very young, quite pretty. My clothes were ridiculous – my mother had bought them for me.” She winces while recalling what she was wearing when she saw her first dead body: white capri trousers and kitten heels.
A man had had a heart attack while fishing and fallen into the river. Glass had to traverse a steep bank, tottering in her heels. “I looked absurd. I could see that the detectives had just stopped what they were doing. There was a dead body, a literal corpse – but they were all watching me.”
Her pluckiness endeared her to the police, who were in a tough spot themselves, underfunded through unprecedented crime. “They would tell me: ‘This is messed up: we have eight detectives covering homicides.’” In exchange Glass provided a sympathetic ear and, often, front-page attention. “It was a great education as a reporter.”
As a young woman in a male-dominated environment, was there ever a current of intimidation to the fascination with her – even a threat? “Intimidation, definitely,” says Glass. She describes meeting with the homicide detectives – six or seven men seated around her in a circle, firing off questions. “‘Have you ever been here before? This is your first job? You’re going to interview us, write about us? How do we know we can trust you?’” Glass grimaces. “I was sweating.”
She had, however, bought work-appropriate clothes. “I learned how to dress myself so I didn’t stand out – to comport myself so that I could become invisible.” Being able to disappear into a room can be “a marvellous thing,” she says – “once you get over the resentment of the fact that you’re being ignored”.
After two intensive years in Savannah, she relocated to New Orleans, where she worked freelance as a correspondent. Her biggest scoop was a case of environmental racism: toxic waste was being dumped in majority Black and Native American communities. “It was enraging. These people were unbearably poor, with no safety net … and then poisoned when they breathed.” It’s not that she has “hero syndrome”, adds Glass. “It just pisses me off when somebody knowingly does the wrong thing.”
In 2000, she moved to London to work as an editor at Time Out, before making the move to Whitehall in 2008. Glass had no particular experience of counter-terrorism; the job was to develop channels for communicating with the public in the event of a terrorist attack. Glass sums it up: “I spent months trying to convince them to have a Twitter account.”
Her frustration was alleviated by the fascination of working alongside spies. Months in, Glass realised the names by which she knew her colleagues were all aliases. “They knew everything about me – how much was in my bank account, how much was charged on my credit card – and I didn’t even know who they were.”
But Glass missed writing and began penning young adult (YA) fiction on the train to and from work. It proved popular. Her first series, Night School, which was published in 2012, went down particularly well in Europe. “I pretty much paid the deposit on my house because of Germany,” Glass laughs.
After five years, she left the civil service to write full-time. More series followed, in YA and adult fiction. Then, in late 2019, the idea for Alias Emma struck. The Salisbury poisonings had happened the year prior; Glass had been especially taken by Sergei Skripal’s daughter Yulia, “nearly killed by her father’s past”.
Glass is now writing the third book in the series, exploring agents’ undercover relationships such as those blown open by the “spy cops” scandal. “I want to look at how it would feel to do that as a spy, to have to go that far … if it’s any different when it’s a man than when it’s a woman.”
Though her work draws on real-life events, “all spy fiction is fantasy to an extent,” Glass says. “I know there are a large number of Russian spies in London; that there is an undocumented, unseen war going on between British spies and Russian spies. We get these glimpses. But the rest they’ll never tell us – we have to make it up.”
For someone who has seen so much of society’s underbelly, Glass shows surprising faith in the institutions set up to protect us. She left the civil service more trusting, not less. When she first started working there, after the 7/7 London bombings, she had been afraid to take the tube, she says. “Within a year I was back on the tube again – not because I felt like it was perfectly safe, but because those guys were all over it. If you’re a spy and you are taking the Victoria line every day, then I’m taking the sodding Victoria line.”
• The Traitor by Ava Glass (£8.99, Penguin) is published on 14 September in paperback.
