How my teen spy in Alias Dragonfly maneuvers through history and doesn’t change a thing.
By Jane Singer
I’m writing a young adult series featuring Pinkerton spy Maddie Bradford a willful, rebellious, reckless, oddball, brilliant and talented teen. Too many adjectives? Oh yeah, but she really is all of those things. And in love to boot. So my challenge was and is to keep her a believable adolescent, a different kind of soldier living and working in the upside down and terrifying world of the Civil War, all the while having her interact with real people and real events without altering the outcome. Big challenge there.

I love spy craft and all things Civil War-related. But as a serious researcher and sometime non-fiction author writing about a war that has spawned thousands and thousands of books and counting, I wanted to be really careful about fact vs. fiction. A struggle then as now.

When I first conceived the Alias series I’d just completed an in-depth study of the lives and missions of Detective Alan Pinkerton’s agents, focusing on the women he employed. And luckily for me and for Maddie, he did just that. And even though some of their true identities are coming to light (I’ll take a little credit for that), during and after the war, their protective boss teased his readers with initials, false names, and a lot of exaggeration, I felt just fine giving Maddie a job with him, getting her inside the house of Rose Greenhow, the most dangerous spy in DC, all the while blooming under the tutelage of Pinkerton’s ill-fated master spy Timothy Webster.

In future blogs, I’d love to tell you about who was real and who wasn’t and how Maddie  and her boyfriend Jake manage to shoot, rescue, help and mess up without turning history on its ear.

More to come …  Oh, and as Maddie tells Jake, “Don’t love a spy.” She doesn’t mean it.