Ava Glass started every London weekday the same way. In the entrance to her office building, she would place her belongings on an airport-style conveyor belt to be x-rayed. Then she’d enter one of ten pods. She would scan her ID card, step inside, and the doors on either side of her would shut. For those few seconds, it was just her and her thoughts in the “glass coffin.” “We all used to talk about it,” she said. “What goes on? Was it sniffing for explosives?” These were a few of the lighter questions native Texan Glass had about her early-aughts job: working with counterterrorism spies for the British government.
Those daily security measures are vividly re-created in Glass’s latest novel, The Trap (September 3, Penguin Random House). In this third installment in her Alias Emma series, British spy Emma Makepeace has been tasked with stopping an assassination at the G7 Summit. Glass draws her fictional narratives from her five years spent working in counterterrorism in the UK government’s Home Office, where espionage felt just as intriguing as it had in all the books she’d read. With Glass’s roots in crime reporting and spy work, the transition to fiction writer feels almost as inevitable as a plot twist in one of the author’s spy novels.
“None of the spies would be using their real names,” said Glass. “I was the only person who everybody knew everything about: they knew the contents of my bank account, they knew my credit card debt, they knew who my family was, where my parents lived, where I’d spent my life, every place I’d lived in the time I’d been in England, and I didn’t even know their names.”
A life of secret doors, nameless offices, and classified communications was not on Glass’s vision board. Born Christi Daugherty, she spent her childhood in Dallas and teen years in Houston, then went on to graduate from Texas A&M with a journalism degree, a major she switched to after watching All the President’s Men. “By the end of the film, I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do,’ ” she said. A few weeks after graduating, in 1988, she boarded a plane to Georgia to work at the Savannah Morning News—the only outlet that offered her a job—as the paper’s first female crime reporter. Her first day on the job was also the first time she saw a dead body.
“I made it to the bank, where there was a corpse which had been in the river for several days,” she said. “It was summer, and the smell . . . It was the first time I smelled death and realized that we are hardwired to be revolted by that smell.” Corpse encounters became a daily norm for her—as did closeness with local police and paramedics. “We were always keeping it light, always keeping it funny, because we only saw each other at the worst places, at the darkest moments in people’s lives.”
After a few years in Savannah, she moved closer to home to work at a newspaper in Galveston, where she lasted only six months. “[Local police] certainly didn’t like journalists who didn’t grow up on Galveston Island. They had this whole BOI [‘Born on the Island’] thing.” (She hasn’t lived in Texas since, but like many Texpats, Glass “feel[s] weird if I haven’t been there in a few years” and visits often.) From Galveston, she moved to Louisiana to cover environmental racism, freelancing for seven years from New Orleans for outlets such as the New York Times and Reuters. In 1999 she went abroad, working as an editor at Time Out London. Then she got the call that led to multiple novels, a nomination for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger crime-writing award, and a legion of fans for Emma Makepeace.
She heard from a friend who worked for the UK government and was looking for someone who wouldn’t be scared to write about terrorism. “I thought, ‘Yeah, there’s an offer I can’t turn down,’ ” Glass said. Her days from then on were spent in the company of spies, sitting in on meetings with agents from MI5 and MI6. She learned how covert operatives helped keep the country safe, especially in the follow-up to the July 7, 2005, bombings on the London Underground. Her challenge was to take the shadowy world of espionage and translate it into messages the public could both understand and feel comforted by. The inspiration was too rich for a writer to pass up.
Though the Alias Emma plots are largely invented, Glass weaves in pieces of reality, as with a description of an MI5 building in The Trap. “There’s a mural on the wall that must be nineteenth-century, a fresco on the ceiling of urchins and gold-gilded fields. It’s so beautiful, and there’s just marble everywhere. It felt so surreal going into that building to have a meeting about terrorism,” she said.
Central to all Glass’s novels is the belief that the male-dominated world of spy fiction needs more women authors to shake things up. “It feels like a male world, a boys’ club; there are [few] spy books by and about women who are believable and recognizable to other women,” she said. Last fall she appeared on a literary festival panel with one other female spy novelist, Kim Sherwood. As far as Glass is concerned, that nod toward representation wasn’t enough. “They can’t put together a panel of women spy fiction writers because there aren’t enough. What’s that about?”
Glass intends to keep pushing. With The Trap out in the world, she’s already at work on her next two projects: a fourth Alias Emma book and another novel about an undercover FBI agent set in Austin. As she said—she can’t keep away from Texas for long.
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