Ava Glass' debut spy novel Alias Emma is set in a dark underworld teeming with secrets and assassins - a world that is intriguingly familiar to the author, an ex-crime reporter who dabbled in the dark arts while working on counterterrorism issues for Britain's Home Office.

Texas-born Glass moved to the UK in 2000 and made her living as a government security and communications expert in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and London Tube bombings. A large part of her Home Office role involved mediating between spies and the public, tackling tricky issues like how much transparency is too much when it involves national security.

“I learned about how dangerous things were,” Glass told SPYSCAPE. “And I did meet a lot of people who worked as actual spies and some of them became friends, so then I was able to draw on things that I could play off in my books later.”

The result is Glass’ sensational debut spy novel Alias Emma (2022), a relentless thriller involving a British secret agent in London who has just 12 hours to save the son of Russian defectors. Moscow has hacked the city’s 500,000 security cameras, however, and there appears to be a deadly threat around every corner. Can Emma deliver her ‘asset’ safely to the Agency?

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Stylish spy novel

In addition to inside knowledge of the spy game, Glass read voraciously - both fiction and nonfiction espionage books - before settling on a distinctive voice for her main character, a gutsy rookie named Emma Makepeace who punches above her weight in a male-dominated world of intrigue.

“Ian Fleming used a lot of crime techniques in his writing and I’m leaning in that direction of the genre rather than, say, John le Carré,” Glass told SPYSCAPE. “I’m writing pacier books much more influenced by the crime genre and the noir genre.”

Fans of 007 and George Smiley will both be thrilled with the results, however. Alias Emma (2022) is already in pre-production at The Ink Factory, the London studio that produced the John le Carré series The Little Drummer Girl and The Night Manager. The studio is run by le Carré's sons, Simon and Stephen Cornwell, further burnishing Ava Glass’ credentials in the highly competitive world of spy novelists.

So who is the espionage genre’s rising star?

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Ava Glass: The ‘accidental’ civil servant

Ava Glass is the pseudonym of Texas native Christi Daugherty, aka C.J. Daugherty, who was born in Dallas and worked as a crime reporter in New Orleans for Reuters, the British news agency. She now lives in the UK with her husband, the BAFTA nominated filmmaker, Jack Jewers.

Glass had moved to Britain to work as an editor for Time Out magazine when a friend suggested she apply to the UK's Home Office to handle counterterrorism issues as part of the communications team. (Glass calls herself an ‘accidental civil servant’ as government work wasn’t initially on her Bucket List.)

While still knee-deep in skullduggery at the Home Office, she wrote her Night School series for young adults which was published by Little Brown and sold more than 1.5m copies worldwide. She later wrote The Echo Killing series, published by St. Martin’s Press, and co-wrote the fantasy series, The Secret Fire, with French author  Carina Rozenfeld. Her books have been translated into 25 languages and are bestsellers in multiple countries.

It’s a heady start for any author, but - much like espionage work itself - the spy genre hasn’t always welcomed female input. That’s changed in the past decade or so, however, as television has introduced more compelling female leads.

“Series like The Americans, Tehran, and Homeland brought interesting, flawed women spies to the forefront and treated them as equals to men in virtually every way,” Glass said. “Watching these series felt like someone was opening a door and waving me in. I think more women are going to join the genre now.”

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The spy writer at work‍

While Glass may know her fair share of shadowy spies, intelligence officers are very skilled at keeping secrets. So too, it seems, is Ava Glass.

Glass admits the character of Emma is modeled on a real-life British espionage agent who she described as “young, in her 20s, extremely focused and competent - almost a frightening level of togetherness and calmness” with a disassociation from her work that Glass found fascinating.

Glass wasn’t giving much away about the real-life spycraft embedded in Alias Emma, however, except that she believes British agencies do sometimes operate out of small offices, unmarked buildings, and in teams tightly focused on, for example, Russian operatives acting within the UK.

“It remains fiction but there are bits that I think are not at all out of the realm of what I know to probably be true. Shall I put it like that?” she laughed.

Alias Emma spy games

Glass spent more than five years at the Home Office but her lifelong goal wasn’t to become a civil servant so she left to pursue a career writing fiction: “The actual truth, most of it doesn’t belong in fiction… Much of spy work now is done on computers. The times where I’ve been admitted into one of the organizations I write about, it’s just rows of computers and it looks like a bank.” 

The ‘good stuff’, as she calls it, involves real-life agents in the field, the invisible, undercover operatives embodied in her fictional character of Emma Makepeace.

“As far as I’m able to determine, real life is much stranger than fiction. In this country, people are poisoned with the tips of poisoned umbrellas. They are killed with polonium put into a teacup in the most expensive hotel in the city. They are killed with nerve agents painted on their door knob. We live in the middle of a spy novel.”

Glass is already writing her next book and looking forward to seeing her words brought to life. The TV pilot and an outline of the Alias Emma series are still in the planning stage but she’s hopeful the project will move forward: “It’s still early days… but it is definitely moving quite quickly in a way that is quite positive, so I’m enjoying seeing what they do with it.”
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