Riley Moore | Content Writer

If I would have read Ava Glass’s newest novel, The Chase, as a child, I would have been a spy when I grew up. 

The Chase follows Emma Makepeace, a British operative, and Michael Primalov, a gentle, kind, and intelligent pediatrician. Michael is being hunted by the Russian state for crimes committed by his family. When Michael was a child, both his mother and father were highly respected nuclear physicists in the Russian weapons programme before defecting to MI6. Twenty years later, the Russians begin to assassinate anyone who had associations with the Primalov’s. MI6 believes that Michael is a target. 

It appears straightforward, retrieve Michael and put him in a secure location. It could be completed immediately. Drive to his address, put him in the back seat. Very simple. But the reader suspects it will not go smoothly, mainly because his or her right thumb is thick with hundreds of pages. 

Indeed, there are many obstacles. Michael is suspicious of Emma and reluctant to follow her. Emma’s boss goes missing. Russian agents burst into the scene, crashing into cars and firing their weapons. And the most devastating fact, the CCTV cameras in London have been hacked, forcing Emma and Michael to travel on their feet, and avoid all recorded areas. As it happens, nearly every area in London is recorded. 

This is Ava Glass’ talent: she is able to implement modern technology, placing the reader firmly and comfortably in the twenty-first century, but her implementation forces her hero backward in time, for Emma must resort to old school spy-craft tactics, like lock picking and disguising herself in pedestrian outfits. It’s what makes the book impressive. Emma and Michael travel using underground rivers. They cut through alleyways and escape through manholes. They dive into midnight parks, avoiding detection. The CCTV cameras have facial recognition software, and therefore work best in daylight. Emma and Michael, then, are on a deadline. They effectively have twelve-hours to reach MI6 or they’ll be discovered. But the reader blitzes through the novel in one sitting. Quite the deal, you get to experience twelve-hours of suspense for only three hours of your time.

Although I didn’t become a spy, for I didn’t have Ava’s novel to prompt me in that direction, I did become an interviewer. And I had the pleasure to interview Ava about The Chase. We spoke over the phone, and she was very kind and genuine and open to talk. Generally, we shouldn’t conflate a writer with their characters. But Ava and Emma are similar in some respects. When you meet them, you feel like you’re meeting a friend. We spoke on February 9th. 

Riley Moore: As I understand, you began your career as a crime journalist, and then later began working for the Home Office, which overlooks security and counter-terrorism. You helped intelligence agencies with communication. Could you sketch your biographical background, and how much did your professional life influence your artistic one? 

Ava Glass: That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure I ever would have written the novel if I hadn’t worked for the government for five years. I was brought in at a time when the government was encouraging people to come work for them. So I sort of ended up working for the Home Office on a complete accident. I never had any background in any government work and suddenly found myself in the middle of this world. People go to school knowing they’re going to work there. It’s their goal. It’s actually quite unusual for somebody to trip into it by accident. And so for five years I had a window into a world I was completely unfamiliar with. I met government ministers and ambitious powerful people, and I met spies. I met intelligence officers who are definitely a group of their own. And so I felt like an outsider doing this. It was obvious that I wasn’t part of that world, but just being able to see it and understand it—that really influenced me tremendously in writing this book.

RM: Let’s start with the title itself: The Chase. There’s multiple chases throughout the novel. Russians chasing Emma, Emma chasing her assignment Micheal, MI6 chasing the Russians. Was it originally Emma, your protagonist, who you imagined being chased? Or was it another character that then spawned the plot? 

AG: In some ways the book was inspired by the film Speed. I happened to see it when I was flying to New York several years ago. I hadn’t seen it in years, and I thought maybe it’s still good. Not only does it hold up, but it’s such a genius construction because as a film, as a work of art, it’s the conceit that they’re on a bus that cannot go below fifty miles an hour or it will explode. And they have to do this for two hours. It’s genius. It adds a level of peril and excitement. It’s thrilling just in concept. And it’s a breathless experience. And as I was watching it, I was thinking: I’d love to write a book like this. But how would you do it? How would you keep up that level of peril? That’s how I came up with the idea. 

RM: So you had wanted to capture the world that you were living in—your professional world of living among spies and directly communicating with them—and you married that idea to a fast paced story that was influenced by the film Speed. Is that accurate?

AG: Yes, I think that’s accurate. 

RM: Let’s talk about the technology you implement in the story. I’m thinking particularly of the surveillance cameras that the Russians hack. I realized while I was reading the book that, a hundred years ago, this kind of novel couldn’t have been written, because surveillance cameras simply weren’t invented yet. And drones also weren’t invented. So you’re really dealing with a new topic in literature. How did you go about using these surveillance cameras in your story, and did anything prompt you to include them?

AG: I have a love-hate relationship with what’s called the ring of steel in London. There’s a hundred-thousand CCTV cameras in a square mile of central London. When I first arrived in the city, I was conscious of them on street corners. I thought—who’s watching me? Was it someone consciously making that decision? Or was it automatic? I found myself standing straighter. Some years passed and now I no longer notice them. I just accept them as a part of life. The cameras have been used to catch murderers. They’ve been used to catch terrorists. They’ve been used to stop terror attacks. They’re a valuable resource in the hands of the authorities. But also anything can be hacked. And so that’s what made me think about how they could be used against us. Emma has this moment in the book where she thinks about how the cameras had always been on her side. She’d always seen them as a tool. But now she sees them as a weapon, and she sees them the way criminals do. They’re a weapon to be used against her. I wanted to play around with the morality of that.

RM: Although you implement technology into your story, you managed to use it in such a way that made it difficult for Emma to use it. For instance, Emma can’t use her cell phone or computer or any device because she’s afraid of being tracked by the Russians. This effectively turned her into an old-school spy, relying on her quick judgements. Was that a priority for you, to create old-school spy-games? 

AG: Absolutely. Taking those away was really useful. With a phone, people feel safer. They feel connected. This is psychologically what we tell ourselves. There’s a scene in the book where Emma makes Michael take off all his clothes in case there’s a tracker embedded in them. At that moment, he realizes his old life is over and all the protections and security and safety he had from being a normal, ordinary British doctor is gone. And now he’s caught up in this spy versus spy battle. They have to find their way by their wits. It brings it to the 20th century. 

RM: I’m imagining you knew the ending to your novel, but had to resist revealing it too soon. How do you, who knows ahead of time the ending of the story, balance the pace of storytelling to both slowly reveal the plot while still maintaining a sense of urgency? 

AG:  When I first sat down to plot it out I thought: how am I going to stretch twelve hours across three-hundred and fifty pages? Then I started looking at the technical part of it. For instance: how would you get across London from Camden to Vauxhall without being caught on camera? It’s canals, it’s parks, it’s tunnels—that’s where you can get away from the cameras. Then I started plotting out Emma and Michael’s route. And the route helped me put a plot together. I knew they’d get caught by the Russians. And Emma knows this. I try to make it really clear from the beginning, in subtle ways, that she knows they’re not going to be able to do this. She knows it’s impossible. It’s just a matter of when they get caught, and how Emma is going to handle it. But in terms of the pace, it simply is a matter of making sure the action happens regularly. So there had to be obstacles, and the obstacles had to be overcome. And there’s also a device in the story—which may or may not be true—that facial recognition software works better in daylight.  They don’t stand a chance in daylight. So that sets a deadline for them, and creates a subconscious stressor for the reader. 

RM: Yes, it does. This novel included details about MI6, MI5, Russian spy networks, and a range of other government agencies. And your main character—Emma—is a British spy. I imagine you had to do a fair bit of research to give authenticity to your story. As we’ve talked about, you have personal experience with spies. How do you know when to put down the facts, and pick up the fiction? 

AG: It’s really a matter of judgment. But I know what I don’t like. What I don’t like is info-dumps. I don’t like those books that start with a treatise explaining that the author has done their research. I didn’t want to justify myself in that way. What I tried to do was to take a scatter approach to the information. So just a line here and there I felt was enough. The nice thing about writing espionage is that it’s a secret world. The more you explain, the less exciting it becomes. The less you explain, the more mystery you can leave. That gives me a little more freedom than you would have at, say, a police procedural where the rules are very set and you’re expected to explain everything.

RM: Of course Emma is a British spy, but you’ve created her beyond her profession. She has a developed personality. She gets nervous, anxious, you develop her childhood, she deals with betrayal and friendship, and is intensely curious and intelligent. Near the beginning, she disguises herself as a nurse, and watches a doctor, Micheal—who is very significant to the story—sing and play an instrument for children suffering from cancer. Now, strictly speaking, this scene isn’t necessary for the plot. But the story is better because of it. Can you speak to the process of including character-driven scenes and moments like this one, and what purpose they serve? 

AG: In some ways, these types of details can make or break a book. Not having them at all makes a book much colder. But having too many of them makes the book too slow. So if I had three chapters of Michael’s life, I would have been bored writing it, and everybody would have been bored reading it. But having one section of a chapter—it’s only a page or two—where we see how Michael acts when he doesn’t know he’s being watched gives us a picture of him. That way, we can care about him when trouble happens later and when he makes mistakes, which he will do. I want people to forgive his mistakes, and to remember that he’s a good guy. He’s learning. And in a way, the same is true of Emma. We get training scenes in order to see a picture of her before she was great at her job. Getting people to care about Emma was a little harder because she can be cold and she is very good at her job. And anybody who’s really, really good at something can seem cold to us. So putting in things that make her human was important to me. A few scenes, a few lines, little quips at her own flaws, her acknowledgment of her flaws—that helps us care about her.

RM: How much do your characters take over the story? I’ve heard certain authors appeal to their own characters to tell them where the plot should go. Is this the case for you? And if not, at what point was Emma easiest to write?

AG: I think characters have a voice and a book is better for me if I get to a point where I can hear that voice in my head. I can literally hear them speaking the lines, and I know what their voice sounds like. It’s a connection to them that’s actually quite scary. The first few times it happens to a writer—when you realize you’re connected to these imaginary people—it’s an odd thing. I’ve compared it to lucid dreaming. It’s not something you can control. You can’t make it happen. I’ve written entire books where I never heard the voice and I fretted. But I do feel happier when I can hear their voices. Now that’s for voice, it’s not so much for plot. But I have sketched out plot points that when I tried to write them, they simply would not write. It was as if the characters did not want to do that. So I have to write something else. But that’s quite rare. And I have read books where I think: that character would not make that choice. So it’s about listening to your own characters. When you create a character, you give them personality traits. Those personality traits have to stay because we don’t change that much. We certainly don’t change over the course of 300 pages of life. So it’s about remembering what you’ve created and being true to that, even if it screws your plot.

RM: That’s funny. I bet it does feel odd to create a character and then that character proceeds to not want to do something that you, as the writer, want to do. Let’s close with looking toward the next book. As I see, you have the next book in the series already completed, and it comes out next summer. Can we know broadly where Emma is going? Did this second book come easier than the first?

AG: I think the second book in a series is always a little easier to write because creating characters is a very time consuming process. For me, that takes almost as long as writing the actual plot. So once you have the characters, you can just pick them up again. And what I had to deal with for the upcoming book was whether I wanted to have another twenty-four hour compressed time format. I decided I didn’t because I think that can become a trap. So I decided to broaden the time so that it takes place over a couple of weeks, and also get Emma out of London because I wanted to introduce more spy-craft. Book two is loosely inspired by an actual case that happened about ten years ago, in which a young MI6 agent was found dead in his London apartment. He was found inside a suitcase, locked from the outside. And there was no evidence anybody else had been in his flat in the case. The police listed it as a suicide. This fascinates me. I wanted to explore what might have happened to him. What if it was an assassination? What if it was something else? Emma and her department believe he was killed by Russians. They want to know which ones. And this takes Emma undercover on an oligarch’s yacht. We get to go into the traditional spy world of the Mediterranean. 

Ava Glass’s second instalment in the Emma series, Game of Spies, releases in August 2023.

The Chase by Ava Glass is out now, Penguin, £9.99.