HAPPY HOLIDAYS

by Melodie Johnson Howe

Bones and I are just now going out in search of a Christmas tree and to buy gifts for the family in the pouring rain. (What? It never rains in California.) Obviously I’m a little behind schedule. So here is an essay I wrote for the book, Thrillers: 100 Must Reads, Edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner.

I wish all of you, dear readers and dear writers, a very merry Christmas. Thank you for supporting Criminal Brief. I don’t how James was able to corral such a crazy, funny, sometimes brilliant, sometimes not, maddeningly erudite, and always unruly group of writers such as us. Thank you, James.

W. Somerset Maugham’s
ASHENDEN or THE BRITISH AGENT (1928)

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was a prolific and successful English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was also one of the most significant travel writers between the two world wars. His first major novel, Of Human Bondage (1915), was decried by the critics, but saved from obscurity by Theodore Dreiser who thought it a work of genius and compared it to a Beethoven symphony. The book has never been out of print. The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and The Razor’s Edge (1944) are among his best known books. His short story, “The Letter,” was turned into a brilliant noir film starring Bette Davis. Numerous other stories, novels, and plays were adapted into movies, such as Rain staring Joan Crawford. Many of his works, including Liza of Lambeth and Cakes and Ale, featured female characters who were ruthless in serving their sexual needs while not thinking of the cost to others. Critics often condemned Maugham for letting his villains off too easily. “It must be a fault of mine that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me,” he responded. During the latter part of his career, he fell from favor, thinking of himself as the “very first row of the second raters.” He died while reading a mystery.

W. Somerset Maugham was a great short story writer. He was also a spy in World War I. Blending his talent and personal experience, he wrote Ashenden or the British Agent (1928). The book is a group of sixteen short stories connected by the character Ashenden, a writer/spy, and R., a British colonel, Ashenden’s recruiter and handler.

Maugham writes in the preface to a later edition, “The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it coherent, dramatic, and probable. That is what I have tried to do in this particular series.”

Each story contains an order from R. that Ashenden must fulfill. Sometimes he succeeds, and sometimes his goal is lost in a maze of emotion created by the unpredictability of human beings. Maugham’s sharply observed characters, wit, and stiff English compassion bring these stories to life.

Here, Maugham gives us a sense of Ashenden and R., the old soldier:

. . so long as the fine weather lasted he was prepared to enjoy himself. He did not see why he should not at least try to combine pleasure to himself with profit to his country. He was traveling with a brand-new passport in his pocket, under a borrowed name, and this gave him an agreeable sense of owning a new personality. He was often slightly tired of himself and it diverted him for awhile to be merely a creature of R.’s facile invention

. . . R. it is true had not seen the fun of it: what humor R. possessed was of a sardonic turn and he had no facility for taking in good part a joke at his own expense. To do that you must be able to look at yourself from the outside and be at the same time spectator and actor in the pleasant comedy of life. R. was a soldier and regarded introspection as unhealthy, unEnglish, and unpatriotic.

The reader never sees the effects of the war in these stories, except in eerily empty European cities where spies maneuver, scheme, and contrive against each other in the name of their country. This is Lucerne as seen through Ashenden’s eyes:

Most of the hotels were closed. The streets were empty, the rowing boats for hire rocked idly at the water’s edge and there was none to take them, and in the avenues by the lake the only persons to be seen were the serious Swiss taking their neutrality, like a dachshund, for a walk with them.

Maugham is brilliant at going from the languid overview, then moving swiftly in for the kill with a sharp devastating observation. One of my favorite stories is “Giulia Lazzari.” It is a love story turned into ugly betrayal by the war. A dancer has captured the heart of an East Indian terrorist who spies for the Germans. Ashenden must get this uneducated creature to write letters to her lover, enticing him to come from neutral Switzerland to France, so he can be captured. The main part of the story takes place in a hotel room where Ashenden cajoles this volatile, angry, sobbing woman into betraying her lover. When writing the letter, she asks him:

“How do I spell absolutely?”

“As you like.”

How succinct. How perfectly put for a spy who wants to give nothing away to the love-obsessed terrorist. When the Indian learns that he has been deceived, he swallows poison in a train station in front of his captors. In the hotel room, Ashenden tells the lady what has happened and that she is free to go. She cries and wails and then suddenly clearheaded asks:

“What are they going to do with his things?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“He had a wristwatch I gave him for Christmas. It cost twelve pounds. Could I have it back?”

And that is the end of love. Maugham captures not only the everydayness of being a spy, but the deadening loss for all those involved.

As with many of his stories, this one is based on an actual event. There was a British agent sent to assassinate the real Indian terrorist and German spy, Chattopadhaya. How deeply was Maugham involved? We don’t know. But Winston Churchill reportedly told Maugham to burn fourteen of his short stories because they gave too much information away. Another story, “The Hairless Mexican,” is about a hit man so overly confident in his murderous skills and sexual prowess that he fails miserably at his mission. Maugham uses irony in place of a gun every time

In creating the Eton-educated Ashenden, Maugham paved the way for Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and many more. I even see Ashenden in P. D. James’s Inspector Dalgliesh. Also, R. is in all likelihood the prototype for M. in the James Bond novels. Alfred Hitchcock used elements from Ashenden in his 1936 film, Secret Agent.

This group of stories was written in a long-ago era. The element of the ticking time bomb so popular in thriller writing today does not exist in them. But the human element does. And its accuracy—on a special tour of the CIA in Langley, I learned that they have a best spy novel list. It’s very short. Ashenden or the British Agent is on it.