As a fan of classic British spy fiction (John Buchan, Erskine Childers, Geoffrey Household), I had long wanted to read the ‘Ashenden’ stories of Somerset Maugham. These proved surprisingly hard to get hold of: I had imagined that, due to his great popularity during his lifetime, secondhand books throughout the English-speaking world would have shelves groaning with Maugham’s works. In fact, I had to do some serious Internet searching to find volume 3 of the Penguin collected Maugham short stories, in which the Ashenden stories are gathered.

Maugham was recruited by British Intelligence during the first World War, and the Ashenden stories are closely autobiographical. Probably the most notable feature of these stories is how little actual espionage Ashenden actually performs. There are seven stories, and he only carries out any spying in four of them. 'Miss King' is essentially an anecdote of international hotel life; ‘His Excellency’ is an ‘as told to’ story with no dependence on Ashenden’s status as a secret agent; and ‘Sanatorium’ is an episode from Ashenden's civilian life, as he recovers from tuberculosis in a remote Scottish sanatorium.

Of the spy stories, ‘The Hairless Mexican’ has Ashenden as escort and paymaster to the man who carries out the real work of retrieving a secret document, and ‘Giulia Lazzari’ casts Ashenden in the role of chaperone to a woman who is used as bait to lure an anti-imperial agitator across a territorial border so he can be arrested and sent back to England for execution. In ‘The Traitor’, Ashenden performs a similar function, sent to tempt a foreign agent to travel to England, where he can be arrested and executed. In this story, Ashenden is particularly ineffectual, and he realizes that in fact his masters were counting on his inability to alter events, as part of their plan.

It is only in “Mr. Harrington’s Washing” that Ashenden really carries out any kind of espionage, and even then, it is more a matter of covert diplomacy than intelligence. Again, it is notable that Ashenden fails in his mission, though this is understandable, given the scale of events that he is attempting to influence. This story is particularly closely based on Maugham’s own experience: not many English writers can include on their curriculum vitae that their government sent them to Russia in order to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution. Maugham emphasizes in his memoir The Summing Up that he was selected for this mission only for want of someone better suited, and that he considered himself completely unqualified. However, he also allows himself the belief that, if he had been sent six months earlier, he could well have succeeded. The story itself is a somewhat contrived character study of an American businessman, sent into Russia on the eve of the Revolution to conclude a deal, with no real understanding of the momentous events unfolding around him, right up to the point where they fatally engulf him.

One can credit Maugham with several original contributions to the spy genre. He is probably the first writer to emphasize the mundane, bureaucratic nature of spy work. Ashenden, when he does any spying at all, is mostly occupied with paying field agents, coding messages and relaying reports which, he suspects, are not even read. Maugham also introduces an element of moral ambiguity and alienation: Ashenden's victims are often seemingly-harmless or even admirable people, who simply happen to be working for the wrong side. Unlike Buchan’s fiercely patriotic heroes, Ashenden is a fairly dispassionate player in ‘the great game’. While he almost never expresses an opinion about the rights and wrongs of his work, Maugham, in his authorial voice, plays up the tragic contrast between the great national interests at stake, and the small, ordinary lives that have to destroyed in their defence. The spy is engaged in a shadow-play, rarely acting against a direct and personal enemy, but rather at second-hand, against another who is similarly removed from the real origin of his actions.

One of the stories involves the death of a completely innocent bystander who has been mistaken for an enemy agent: Ashenden regrets this, but more as a strategic mistake than a moral wrong. Another has him destroying the lives of a fairly ineffective husband-and-wife pair of foreign agents, who are otherwise a devoted loving couple. In 'Giulia Lazzari', the man Ashenden must trap into captivity and death is an agitator against British rule in India, who, as Maugham makes clear, is in every respect an admirable human being. The notion of the spy as a kind of existential Everyman could well have its origins in Ashenden.