Spy vs Spy - an interview with Publisher’s Weekly
The lovely folks over at Publisher’s Weekly were kind enough to give Alias Emma a starred review (which, in the world of books, is a little bit like getting a Michelin star!) and I was delighted to sit down with them and chat a little bit about Emma’s world, my inspiration and why I think Emma’s multicultural background makes her a particularly interesting character to write.
One of the questions they asked me was about the comparisons people have been making between Emma and James Bond. This is amazing to me every time I hear it - while there are elements of James Bond as a franchise that I find problematic (more on that later…!), I love Ian Fleming’s writing, as well as the newer Bond novels by Sebastian Faulks, Jeffrey Deaver and Anthony Horowitz, amongst others. So I’m incredibly flattered by that comparison (especially when it comes from my hero James Patterson!), and in many ways I agree - but I do also see a difference between James and Emma.
James is impossibly cool - calm under pressure, polished by his years of service, experienced and worldly-wise. Emma is some of those things, and has the potential to become the others - but she’s also green. She’s early on in her career, full of optimism and black-and-white thinking.
And what’s interesting about her journey in Alias Emma is that so many of her previously fixed ideas - about her vocation, about herself, about the people she loves and trusts - are challenged, and she ends the book in a very different place to where she started. Emma changes, whereas the delight for me of James Bond is that he’s always James Bond - no matter where or when his story takes place, he is the suave, experienced character that we know and love.
In that sense, Emma is a very real person - flawed, fallible, and prone to getting hurt by her mistakes, just like the rest of us. But that’s what I love about her. And I hope you’ll love her too once you get to read her story in August.
