Ashenden, or, The British Agent

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There is also a story about the flamboyant “Hairless-Mexican”, who wears a wig, in fact several, but hasn’t a hair on his face. Maugham has the ability to make a despicable person interesting, intriguing and kind of fun. You should not like the person, but you do! It may have been a bit of self-promotion, but Maugham later said that after the book was published Winston Churchill accused the author of contravening the Official Secrets Act, resulting in Maugham destroying 17 unpublished stories which presumably would have been a sequel. I don't know that I'd go quite so far as that. He hasn't had the value of a public-school education. His ideas of playing the game aren't quite the same as yours and mine. I don't know that I would leave a gold cigarette-case about when he was in the neighbourhood, but if he had lost money to you at poker and he had pinched your cigarette-case, he would immediately pawn it to pay you." His fame as a short story writer began with The Trembling of a Leaf, subtitled Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, in 1921, after which he published more than ten collections. His other works include travel books such as On a Chinese Screen, and Don Fernando, essays, criticism, and the autobiographical The Summing Up and A Writer's Notebook.

In contrast, Maugham’s portrayal of the ‘villains’ is humane and sympathetic. For example, in The Traitor, the description of the German spy learning that the British have executed her husband leaves the reader sympathising with her, not with Ashenden. William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style. Some jobs are ruthlessly executed, even if it means luring a spy from the opposing camp over to the Allied side under false premises to meet his death. Sometimes the job is botched, and the wrong man is bumped off. And some stories have nothing to do with spying but consist of matters of the heart or of events that reveal human character. Il che echeggia la vicenda personale dello stesso Maugham che durante la Grande Guerra fu coinvolto dal servizio di spionaggio inglese, proprio come anni dopo capitò a Graham Greene.The novel opens with a brief description of Ashenden’s recruitment to the Secret Service by ‘R’. ‘R’ assigns Ashenden to Switzerland, a hotbed of spying because of its location and its neutrality. Miss King A character named "William Ashenden" is the narrator of Maugham's 1930 novel Cakes and Ale. [30] A character named Ashenden also appears in several other of Maugham's short stories. Every now and then, we find out that this secret agent is not a natural psychopath like 007 but one socially constructed entirely by war and empire. Maugham described ‘R’ as the Head of the Secret Service. This is obviously a reference to the actual head of the Secret Service, Mansfield Cumming, who signed himself ‘C’. In fact, there are so many different locales, so many colorful people participating in so many unconnected stratagems, revealing themselves in so many distinct conversations, that it would not be surprising if a reader concluded that Ashenden was no more than a collection of themed short stories printed in chapters to make it look like a novel.

This book consists of a handful of interconnected short stories about a British intelligence officer, Ashenden. The stories are based on Maugham’s own experiences as an intelligence agent stationed in Switzerland working for the Allies during the First World War and then in St. Petersburg as an undercover agent with Kerensky in power and the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution soon to take place. The stories are set in Geneva, Basel, Lausanne and Lucerne, Switzerland, Thonon, France and St. Petersburg, Russia.

Ashenden, Gentleman Spy in five episodes, abridged by Neville Teller, produced by Eoin O'Callaghan and read by Alex Jennings. Part of the Book at Bedtime series. [28] He had charming manners and was much interested in the Fine Arts. But now Ashenden and he pretended they had never seen one another before. Each of course knew on what work the other was engaged and Ashenden had had a mind to chaff him about it—it seemed absurd when he had dined with a man off and on for years and played cards with him, to act as though he did not know him from Adam…”

I was very impressed by this book. It was the first book I read by W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham's beautiful writing evokes the life of a spy and is based on his own spying experiences during World War 1. William Somerset Maugham, famous as novelist, playwright and short-story writer, was born in 1874, and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St. Thomas' Hospital with a view to practising medicine, but the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, won him over to letters. Of Human Bondage, the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915, and with the publication in 1919 of The Moon and Sixpence his reputation as a novelist was established. His position as a successful playwright was being consolidated at the same time. His first play, A Man of Honour, was followed by a series of successes just before and after World War I, and his career in the theatre did not end until 1933 with Sheppey.

Ashenden is an exaggerated autobiography. It’s based on Somerset Maugham’s activities for MI6 during World War One, although dramatised. The first ‘realistic’ spy story? Ashenden (1927) is of interest as it is quite the early precedent for the 1960s & later cynical spy novels of John le Carré, Len Deighton and others. Ashenden is a fictionalized version of Maugham himself, who did actually work for the British Secret Service in Switzerland and Russia during the First World War. The writer Ashenden is recruited as an agent runner by R, an otherwise nameless chief in British Intelligence. As mentioned in the above excerpt he is mostly just acting as a handler, paying off the actual spies and relaying messages. The assignments all end in failure with misunderstandings, botched assassinations, and bungled attempts at manipulation.