DUBBED the Queen of Spy Fiction, top spy novelist Ava Glass has her sights set on Scotland, with her new Edinburgh-set thriller The Trap published by Penguin as its lead title this month.
Based on her first-hand experience working with MI5 and MI6, Glass writes female-led spy novels that are packed full of fast action, high-stakes glamour and dangerous liaisons, with The Trap already getting the Hollywood treatment.
Taking place over a week in Edinburgh, the novel follows plucky young spy Emma Makepeace and her Scottish sidekick Kate Mackenzie who have less than a week to decode, defuse and disable a deadly threat to the G7 summit.
Speaking ahead of her appearance at Bute Noir crime festival this afternoon, Glass told the Sunday National how both her work in counter-terrorism and her previous experience as an investigative and crime reporter for The New York Times and Reuters had informed her writing.
“I worked for the UK Government in the mid-2000s and started around the time of the G8 summit in Edinburgh so I knew a bit about the security that went into that and the threats they were concerned about,” she said. “I wanted the story to have some reality and Edinburgh is such a beautiful setting.”
A journalist by profession, Glass was offered a government communications job in counter-terrorism.
“My role was to tell people what to do and where was safe in the event of a terror attack and around that I was to communicate what spies were doing to make people and cities safer,” she explained.
After winning their trust, Glass discovered the spies were carrying out “astonishing” work to prevent terrorism.
“It was a fascinating look at how this world operates,” she said. “The wonderful thing was that there were no terror attacks in the time I was there but by the end of six years, I was bored because there was nothing much for me to do.”
To keep herself occupied, Glass started writing novels in her spare time and penned a young adult fiction series before moving on to crime novels.
She then felt she would like to start writing spy novels but was struck by the fact that most of the well-known books in the genre were written by men who portrayed women like “cardboard cutouts”.
“I read every book that is considered a great spy novel and not one of them was by a woman or about a woman, not a single one, and the female characters in them were generally unrecognisable as women,” said Glass.
“I felt really flummoxed and when I pitched my idea to my agent, she said the problem was that women don’t read spy fiction and men don’t read spy books written by women.”
Having read the books, Glass understood why they were not appreciated by women readers.
“I can see why women don’t want to read books that make them feel they want to take a shower,” she said. “Even though the stories are good and the writers are great, their views of women are just reprehensible and that is just saddening.”
Fortunately, her agent liked the outline of her first spy novel, The Chase, so much that she told her to go ahead and write it. It sold slowly at first but sales built up and the second in the series, The Traitor, was picked as a Richard and Judy read, which brought it to a wider audience.
Now Glass is delighted that both men and women are fans of the books.
“Women do love thrillers – it is just convincing them that spy thrillers can be fun too,” she said.
“The women in my books are recognisable, believable spies but the books are not just for women. I am getting more and more male readers too which makes me really happy.”
The Trap is the third in the series and was optioned for TV before it was even published. A screenplay is now being written in Hollywood although its streaming platform has not yet been announced.
And, as one of very few women shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, the UK’s spy fiction prize, Glass intends to continue breaking down the door to the most male-dominated genres in the English language, the espionage novel.
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