![]() He spends as much time fretting about being unable to turn the hot water tap of his bath with his toe (“He had often heard people tell him that he possessed character… they had never seen him in a hot, but diminishingly hot, bath”) as he does worrying about the consequences of his actions. The tales are at once funny and moving, grim and glamorous, shot through with pathos and bathosīut it’s Ashenden himself who fascinates, wearing both cynicism and compassion equally. All because he won’t leave without his laundry. ![]() An innocent tourist is assassinated in a case of mistaken identity the “absurd but lovable” American salesman Mr John Quincy Harrington, “a bore”, is killed during the Bolshevik uprising in Moscow. “I loved her,” he cries, “but I knew she must not leave the room alive.” Comedy is tempered with harsh reality. Jolly English traitors are tricked by Ashenden and sent to their deaths by firing squad Indian agitators commit suicide with arsenic, while in one story, a beautiful Russian agent is killed by her besotted lover. But Ashenden has an exotic pungency of its own: midnight bridge games with Egyptian princes ice cold countesses of dubious loyalty traitorous Bengalis corpulent pashas alluringly vulgar acrobats priapically hairless Mexicans, and “emancipated princesses who wore garish frocks and danced with strange men in second-rate cafés”.Ĭodes are smuggled from France to Switzerland, hidden “deep down between those voluminous breasts” of fat peasant women, and the consequences of treachery are fatal. You won’t find fist fights and car chases, killer centipedes and high-tech gadgets. ![]() Yet although they lack le Carré’s moral outrage, or the casual, luxury-steeped ruthlessness of Bond, the Ashenden stories mix languid charm with a steely core. John le Carré once said that Maugham was “the first person to write about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality”. “If you do well you’ll get no thanks,” he’s told, in those eternal words, “and if you get into trouble you’ll get no help.” Recruited and run by The Colonel, or R, a man with “hard, cruel eyes… and a cunning, shifty look”, he was very much on his own. He’d been sent to Geneva, “knowing the risks, to do work of a certain kind”. Although Switzerland was neutral, the authorities there took a dim view of spies. As a successful writer, he goes to Geneva to write his new play, “a comedy”, as he tells a lumpenly suspicious Swiss policeman, “and a light one at that”. Just like Maugham, Ashenden has the perfect cover. These are some of the greatest espionage tales ever written The prose is as crisp and bracing as that first martini, the pace brisk, the characters beautifully drawn. Because these tales are anything but dull. The material it offers for stories is scrappy and pointless the author has himself to make it coherent, dramatic and probable.” Which he does, with elegant aplomb. “The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole extremely monotonous,” repeats Maugham in his introduction. In this, he is merely echoing the views of his creator, short story master W Somerset Maugham, who served in the British Secret Service during WWI and, in 1928, published a book of connected stories under the title Ashenden: Or the British Agent. “The work he was doing was evidently necessary,” Ashenden muses, “but it could not be called anything but monotonous.” Albeit one undercover, stationed in Switzerland, during the First World War. Rather the dry, daily grind of a middle-ranking civil servant. Not for him the picaresque shenanigans of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, nor Richard Hannay’s Boy’s Own bravado. Before Bond and his brutal swagger, Harry Palmer’s modernist melancholy, and the short, balding but brilliant Smiley, there was Ashenden.
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