Spy vs. Spy: PW Talks with Ava Glass

Glass, the pseudonym of Christi Daugherty (the YA Night School thrillers), introduces a novice British spy, Emma Makepeace, in Alias Emma (Bantam, Aug.).

Why the pseudonym?

Alias Emma is very different from my previous books. I want this series to have its own unique identity. And I want Ava Glass to have her own unique identity as well.

Some early readers are likening Emma Makepeace to a female James Bond. Is that how you see her?

I read a lot of spy fiction before I started writing and kept coming back to Ian Fleming. In the novels, Bond is determined, incredibly skilled, with a dry wit. But while there’s an element of Bondian fantasy to Emma’s ingenuity, she’s also flawed. When things blow up, she gets hurt. I hope she feels real to people. She feels real to me.

There are more than 500,000 CCTV cameras in London. How did this help inspire the plot for Alias Emma?

Years ago, in a quiet London neighborhood, I noticed a CCTV camera mounted and pointed straight at me. When I moved, it moved with me and tracked my progress until I turned the corner. I’ve always wondered what would happen if those cameras were hacked by an enemy state.

Emma relies mostly on her wits and old-fashioned tradecraft. Was it difficult to balance the technology-rich reality of today with the needs of your narrative?

Introducing old-school spycraft was at the top of my agenda for this book. There’s something exhilarating about the old methods. And I can assure you there are still people on the ground all over the world doing in-person, death-defying spy work. That’s the kind of intelligence work Emma does. It’s why the agency she works for doesn’t have a name. It’s too secret to be identified in any way.

The action is very kinetic, but you paint a convincing picture of Emma’s background and motivation. How did you conceive of her character?

Emma was born in England, but her roots are in Russia. This gave her a complexity I could play with throughout the book: strong but vulnerable, smart but prone to taking risks, multilingual—and dedicated to her adopted country.