Winding closes, a looming castle and plenty of places to hide: Scotland’s capital is a perfect location for the new novel by Ava Glass, the crime reporter turned bestselling queen of spy fiction

Lead image: Salisbury Crags, Edinburgh. Credit: VisitScotland / Kenny Lam
Interview: Cheryl Caira

Was Edinburgh always on your hit list as a novel setting?

I knew I wanted to set this book during a G7 meeting, and I was thinking about different locations in the UK that could host it. I first started working for the government around the time of the G8 in Scotland in 2005, and it was in my mind that Edinburgh would be the perfect setting for spies, governments at war with each other and the dark stuff that comes along with that. I know how it worked the last time, with streets fenced off by security as world leaders arrived. I wanted to explore that feeling of everything gradually closing in.

Did you do a lot of recon around the city while you were writing the book?

I kept flying up to look for the right buildings, because I know when spies travel to these events, they put themselves in office buildings or places nobody would think to look. So I wanted to find the right location, then I had to know how they would get from there to the various crime scenes that I was writing. So I walked and drove around the city to get a feel for it.

Author Ava Glass

You went from being a journalist to joining the Home Office communications department, working with MI5 and MI6 and encountering spies first-hand. How did your expectation of the world of espionage compare with the reality?

I had the same sort of expectation that everybody else has, and it was entirely formed by films and BBC programmes like Spooks. The reality is, spies look like everybody. They’re just ordinary, and that surprised me. The first spy I ever met was part of my security check, and I never suspected her. She befriended me for three weeks, asked a lot of questions and then disappeared. I was completely bamboozled, because Hollywood never told me it was possible for a 27-year-old woman to be a spy.

The Trap is your third novel in the Emma Makepeace series – a secret agent tasked with stopping a high-profile assassination at the G7 summit.

Emma’s character was actually inspired by the spy I just mentioned. I wanted to write about what it was like to be her. This time she’s working closely with a Scottish police officer, who is assigned to be her guide to the city. Neither of them wants the other there, but they learn that they need each other.

Was it important for you to write female-led novels within a genre that’s traditionally been male dominated?

The fact is, male spy writers in the 20th century wrote women out of spying, which is a crime against the truth. Women have been spies from the very beginning. When I worked with spies, at least half were women. It suits the spy agencies for people not to know this, because then – like me – you’re much more easily fooled if you underestimate a woman’s ability to be a spy. It was really important to me to write what I saw and fill in that gap.

How do you look back on your eight years as a crime reporter?

As a reporter in the US, you get extremely close to the crime. At 22, one of the first things I learned was how to get blood off my shoes. The second thing you learn is to look for the blood so you don’t step in it. That is going to mess with your head. I met old crime writers, and they were bitter – and there weren’t many I would have described as fully sane. I knew I didn’t want that for myself. At the same time, what I saw during those years in some really impoverished cities in the American South, was life as people are living it right now – poverty and struggle, poor education, unfairness and loss. I understand the world a little better because I had those experiences.

How did it shape your journey into becoming a fiction writer?

I do remember standing on a street corner in the rain, when there was a sniper on top of a building in downtown Savannah and saying to the cop sitting next to me, ‘one day I’m going to write about this kind of thing.’ It took me 25 years to get around to it. I write through the things I saw, and a lot of my characters have done the things that I’ve done.

 The Trap by Ava Glass is out now, priced at £8.99