City Spies
City Spies
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James Ponti on City Spies
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A Paris detour that became a new worldThe series did not begin as a series. Ponti was on a family trip to London, visiting his son who was studying abroad, and he was supposed to be developing a third installment of his existing Framed! detective series. By the time the trip reached Paris, the plan had collapsed and a replacement had taken shape.
By the time we reached Paris, I’d decided not to bring the *Framed* characters to Europe but rather create an entirely new series that visited the great cities of the world and that became *City Spies*.
wordspelunking.blogspot.com, “Word Spelunking: Interview: James Ponti, author of City Spies”Behind the globe-trotting premise was something more personal. Ponti grew up never knowing his father, and the absence left a pattern in his work he could track across more than a decade of books before City Spies.
I never met my father. He wasn’t a part of my life at all, which was often hard. As a writer, you’re drawn to the hard parts of your life and try to deal with them in the manuscript. That’s why my first eleven books all featured major characters who were in some way separated from their parents.
In City Spies, that pattern becomes the premise itself: a handler who recruits displaced children and takes them in, forming the kind of deliberate family Ponti never had.
On the Artsy Raven Podcast, he made the connection between his biography and the specific design of the handler-and-recruits relationship explicit. The handler, Codemaster Blue, travels the world gathering kids rather than leaving them behind.
My father never came to look for me. So I wanted to write about a guy who would move around, go around the world to find his kids... to me it’s really about a family and what is a real family. [paraphrased from audio]
There was a fourth pressure: his own reading history. Ponti struggled as a young reader, and that experience set a bar every book in the series still has to clear.
My goal was to write a series that young me would’ve wanted to read. I was an extremely reluctant reader, so I keep that in mind when I work on the books.
How he wrote it
Television habits applied to the pageOne of the first problems Ponti had to solve was character differentiation. He’d been thinking about the problem since watching Dead Poets Society with his mother, who turned to him midway through and said she couldn’t tell the boys apart. His answer was to give each operative a city name as a codename, so that a character’s origin and backstory travel with every mention of their name.
It’s not Tom and Bob and Larry. It’s Paris. Oh, he’s the one for France — so I know his backstory instantly every time I see Paris.
He spent a full day scanning atlases and city lists to find place names that also worked as given names, then chose one per continent.
City Spies was Ponti’s first book written in third person. Every previous project, including his years writing for television, had trained him to work through a single point of view and rely on dialogue to carry meaning. The shift was not comfortable.
City Spies was the first book I wrote in third person and it terrified me throughout the process.
nerdybookclub.wordpress.com, “A TV Writer Finds His Happy Place by James Ponti | Nerdy Book Club”His wife read each chapter as he finished it, and her reactions served as his primary gauge of whether the wider viewpoint was working.
His two decades producing television documentaries left him with a specific fieldwork habit. Rather than relying on maps or secondary sources, he visits every location before writing its scenes, treating each trip the way a production team treats a shoot.
I scout them the same way I would when I was producing a television show. I go to the location, try to figure out how I would block the action, and take a ton of photographs.
The Edinburgh airport and train station chapters in the first book were written with those scouting photographs on his screen.
The personal thread
A childhood absence written into the plotPonti’s found-family premise is not a genre convention he reached for. It is a lifelong preoccupation routed through autobiography. The same impulse that shaped his first eleven books concentrated, in City Spies, into a premise where the formation of a surrogate family is not background texture but the central event.
I never met my father. He wasn’t a part of my life at all, which was often hard. As a writer, you’re drawn to the hard parts of your life and try to deal with them in the manuscript. That’s why my first eleven books all featured major characters who were in some way separated from their parents.
In the Artsy Raven Podcast, he described how the handler character, Codemaster Blue, functions as a direct inversion of his own experience of fatherhood: a man who pursues his charges rather than disappearing from them.
My father never came to look for me. So I wanted to write about a guy who would move around, go around the world to find his kids... to me it’s really about a family and what is a real family. [paraphrased from audio]
On craft choices
The mechanics underneath the adventureBeyond the city-name codenames, Ponti gave each of the five young operatives one of what he described as his five biggest problems from middle school. The exercise served a dual purpose: it deepened each character’s interior life, and it protected against the unconscious tendency to favor whichever character the writer most identified with.
I took my five biggest problems as a middle schooler, and I gave each kid one of those problems. So that in a way, they would be five variations of me in middle school.
The cliffhanger chapter endings that drive the book’s pace were not a structural choice Ponti made for City Spies specifically. They arrived pre-installed from his television years, where act breaks ending on tension were simply how scripts were built.
Television format is built on the idea of a cliffhanger at the end of each act. I think after years of doing it, it just became second nature.
Humor is load-bearing in the books. Ponti uses it to shift power dynamics, not simply to relieve tension. He drew on a survival strategy from his own childhood and transplanted it into the operatives’ toolkit.
I put characters in difficult situations, but if they can still be funny, it gives them agency and power.
What he wants us to sit with
Belonging as the real missionPonti is specific about what the espionage genre is actually delivering. The missions give the five operatives something to be good at together. The destination, though, is a condition they have never experienced individually.
Each of them comes from a background in which they were continually let down by adults. They’ve been overlooked by society and forced to move around the shadows of life relying on their wits and resilience. These are the same skills that make for excellent spies. But mostly, they are drawn to the fact that in doing this they become part of something none of them have ever had — a family.
He also argues that the spy genre suits the middle-grade audience in a way that goes beyond excitement. The operational conditions of espionage map onto the social experience of early adolescence so closely that the analogy becomes a form of recognition for the reader.
I think being a spy is the perfect analogy for being a middle schooler: you kind of lurk around in the shadows trying to figure out the world and solve the codes that people use, all while trying on different identities so that you can blend in better.
In a video interview about the Europa installment (the fifth book in the series, set partly in space-program territory), he described the argument he carries through every book in the series. The adventure is the delivery mechanism; the model is the message.
I like to write stories about the way that problems have historically always been solved, by people who care working together and helping each other. And I’m going to write about that in a way that you’re so busy having fun on the adventure, trying to solve the puzzle, that you didn’t even realize, oh wait, we’ve really modeled the right behavior here. [paraphrased from audio]