A ‘dead’ man who sat up while encased in a body bag, a Starsky and Hutch-style race across one of the US’s most crime-ridden cities, red blood splashed across white high heels…
These might sound like plotlines from a crime novel, but these are actual things that happened in novelist Ava Glass’s life.
Dubbed ‘the Queen of Spy Fiction’, the Texas-born writer has decades of adrenaline-fuelled experiences to inspire her books, thanks to decades of crime reporting.
Growing up in Dallas, Texas, Ava says she had a ‘complicated family’, which saw her father abuse her mother. When she turned 19, she watched the 1976 film All The President’s Men – and, fascinated by the dogged investigation into the Watergate scandal, Ava dreamed of becoming a political reporter and changing the world herself.
She went to university to study journalism and her first job came at the Savannah Morning News in Georgia. There, she was tasked with proving herself as the newspaper’s first ever crime reporter.
‘One of the first things I learned was how to get blood off your shoes,’ Ava recalls. ‘Water wouldn’t do it, soap won’t do it. Paramedics gave me some very strong alcohol wipes which would take the blood off. But if you used them too much it would take off everything else and reach the leather in your shoes.
‘I was naive but I learned fast, I was in my early twenties and fearless. At that kind of age, you’re vulnerable and gullible enough to say, “sure, I’ll spend my night chasing bullets across a dangerous city with a high murder rate, that will be amazing.”’
Ava saw her first dead body – a fisherman who had fallen in the river – when she was just 21, and wearing white capri trousers and kitten heels at the time.
The young reporter would race from one crime scene to another, where people had been killed by stabbing, shooting, fatal overdoses and grievous bodily harm. Seeing up to ten bodies in one night was not uncommon in the dangerous city and the 22-year-old soon stopped being shocked at the sight of blood, guts and gore.
Ava, who worked from 6pm to 1am, used police radios to listen to murmurings and exchanges between emergency services. [A practice legal in the States but not in the UK.] When she and the newspaper’s photographer heard the words “back-up, back-up” crackle through, they would jump into their separate cars and race to the location mentioned by the officers.
‘All the cops were at the crime-scene so there was no-one to pull us over,’ Ava laughs. ‘It was exhilarating, it felt like Starsky and Hutch.’
Looking back, Ava says there were moments when she did pause to consider the danger, such as when she was ‘left behind’ in a notorious part of the city with nothing but a notebook and pen to defend herself.
Nothing happened, she explains, but Ava realised how vulnerable she was without the emergency services at her side, and soon learned to leave a crime scene when police did.
‘One case still plays on my mind,’ Ava adds. ‘It was a domestic abuse incident where I was outside the door while police were inside. I could barely hear a thing over the sound of a baby wailing. Suddenly, a cop emerged and put a terrified baby boy into my arms. I was 22 then, I don’t know if I’d even held a baby before. I just kept saying “you’re going to be fine, you’re going to be fine.” I often wonder what became of that baby. He grew up in a pretty bad neighbourhood, so I wonder if he really was fine.’
While media requests go through police press offices today; in Ava’s time, reporters talked freely with officers and detectives. They’d be eager for their hard work to be conveyed to the public and happy to speak with the press as a result.
There was only one incident where Ava admits that she got into some bother. One police officer told her how he’d been filling in paperwork at a morgue for a body which had just been brought in. All of a sudden, the ‘dead’ man sat up in his body bag; leading the copper to scream and stumble out of the room as the morgue assistant laughed.
‘It was such a good story,’ Ava recalls. ‘I wrote it up but he then said he hadn’t given me permission. He was the only police officer present so they knew exactly who had given the information and he got in trouble for it and never trusted me again.’
Ava went on to work at Reuters and the Dallas Morning News, covering court, corporate meetings, conventions and – to her dismay – less crime. While the work was interesting and her stories often picked up by the New York Times, she missed the adrenaline. When a journalist job offer in England emerged in 1999 she jumped at the chance for a fresh start.
Little did she know it would lead, in 2008, to a phone call from a former colleague telling her that the British Government needed someone who could write about counter terrorism and ‘not get scared.’
Ava knew she fit the bill.
Aged 33 by then, she took part in spy drills, worked in communications to convey the work the counter-terrorism unit was doing to the public and, crucially, signed the Official Secrets Act. As a result, Ava can’t give too much away – however, she still remembers one of the strangest mysteries from the open plan office where she worked.
There was a mysterious ‘Floor 7’ where a locked wooden door awaited, if you tried to leave on that floor. What took place behind that door, she – and we – will never know.
With a lifetime of exciting experiences, when Ava left her government role, she decided to try her hand at yet another job; writing crime fiction.
In bustling coffee shops near her south London home, she typed out explosive chase scenes and tense exchanges between spies while listening to jazz in her earphones. Like the MI5 spies she met, she uses an alias – Ava Glass isn’t her real name.
Her series of novels, which follows fictional 28-year-old intelligence agent Emma Makepeace, were soon picked up by publishers, with the first two being optioned for TV by the team behind BBC’s The Night Manager.
Ava’s third – ‘The Trap’ – has just been published.
‘It begins seven days before the G7 summit is due to take place in Edinburgh,’ Ava explains. ‘The city is prepared, everything is in place. But then GCHQ [the UK’s intelligence, security and cyber agency] begins to hear chatter about an attack.’
One of the very few women shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, the UK’s spy fiction prize, Ava recalls her publisher ‘took a risk’ with the Emma Makepeace series, fearing that a female spy as the main character could be difficult to sell to men.
But this was the exact cultural norm Ava wanted to overcome.
She’d always been an avid reader of spy fiction, but felt a sense of ‘outrage’ that all the popular espionage series – such as books by former spies Ian Fleming, John le Carré and Graham Greene – placed little faith in their female characters.
‘Some crime and spy fiction is appalling, ludicrously awful at points,’ says Ava. ‘Women are victims, there for their looks, to be used and abused. I met female spies and saw none of them on the pages of those books. So, I did something about it.’
Despite her latest success as a novelist, Ava still credits her early career as a crime reporter as shaping her world view and her boldness for the adventures which followed.
‘Although my parents didn’t have much money, they were pretty protective of us,’ she says. ‘We were quite sheltered.It was quite a shock to get into that world and find out not only did I like it, I could handle it. I wasn’t afraid of it.
‘Being a journalist gave me a complete education about the world, poverty and crime.’
The Trap by Ava Glass (Penguin Books, £9.99) is out now.
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