Ashenden: Or the British Agent is a 1927 collection of loosely linked stories by W. Somerset Maugham. It is partly based on the author's experience as a member of British Intelligence in Europe during the First World War.
Ashenden: Or the British Agent is a 1927 collection of loosely linked stories by W. Somerset Maugham. It is partly based on the author's experience as a member of British Intelligence in Europe during the First World War.
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During the First World War, a writer named Ashenden, referenced only by his surname, is enlisted as an agent through threats and promises by "R.", a Colonel with British Intelligence. He is sent to Switzerland where he becomes involved in a number of counter-intelligence operations; these he accomplishes by means of persuasion, bribery, blackmail, or coincidence. He does not use a weapon.
In one, he accompanies a man called the Hairless Mexican to Italy, where they are to intercept important papers carried by an arriving Greek agent of the Germans. The Hairless Mexican meets the only Greek on the incoming ship, and during a search of the Greek's hotel room, the Hairless Mexican and Ashenden do not find any papers. As they prepare to leave the country, Ashenden decodes a cable which tells him that the intended Greek had never boarded the ship; spots of dried blood on the Hairless Mexican's sleeve mean that he had killed the wrong man.
In another, Ashenden must induce an Italian dancer to betray her lover, an anti-British Indian and a German agent, by convincing him to cross the border from neutral Switzerland to see her in allied France, where the Allies can arrest him. The ironic denouement is that after the man is captured by the British, he commits suicide before he can be arrested, tried, and executed. When she finds out of his death, the dancer goes to Ashenden and asks to get back the valuable watch she had given to the man whom she has just betrayed.
After a number of similar operations, Ashenden is sent to Imperial Russia during the 1917 revolution, as an "agent of influence", to do what he can to keep Russia in the war against Germany. He spends eleven days on the train from Vladivostok to Petrograd sharing a cabin with Harrington, an American business man who is a constant conversationalist. A few days after they arrive, the revolution breaks out in earnest. As they try to evacuate, the business man insists on getting back his laundry that had been sent out. During his return with the laundry, Harrington is killed in a street riot.
The stories combine Maugham's talent at character detail with a tragic structure where an affecting and sometimes funny person is damaged in the game of national spying. Some regard these as the forerunner of all the more sceptical spy fiction written by such as Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and books such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold . Raymond Chandler was a great admirer of Ashenden, writing to the author in January 1950: "There are no other great spy stories - none at all. I have been searching and I know". [1]
In later collections, the chapters are combined and collected under different titles, as below.
The incidents described in the stories are modelled on Maugham's experiences as a secret agent, and "the central character, Ashenden, is very much an autobiographical character." [2] He is supposed to have modelled Chandra Lal after Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, an Indian Nationalist in Germany during the war. [3] Maugham, who was in the British Secret Service in Europe during the war, based a number of his stories on his own experiences. Among other enterprises, Britain's European intelligence network attempted to eliminate a number of Indian nationalists in Europe, notably members of the Berlin Committee. Donald Gullick, a British agent, was dispatched to assassinate Chattopadhaya while the latter was on his way to Geneva to meet another Indian nationalist, Mahendra Pratap and forward the Kaiser's invitation to Berlin. The short story of Giulia Lazzari is a blend of Gullick's attempts to assassinate Chattopadhyaya and Mata Hari's story. Winston Churchill reportedly advised Maugham to burn 14 other stories. [4] [5] [ page needed ]
There have been many full cast adaptations of the stories for BBC Radio. [6]
There are also various BBC serialised solo readings:
There is also at least one full length audiobook:
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.
The character appears briefly in the book The Bloody Red Baron by Kim Newman.
"Ashenden" is mentioned a number of times in the Mick Herron novel "Slow Horses".
William Somerset Maugham was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories.
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Captain Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming was a British naval officer who served as the first chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
Secret Agent is a 1936 British espionage thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, adapted from the play by Campbell Dixon, which in turn is loosely based on two stories in the 1927 collection Ashenden: Or the British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham. The film stars Madeleine Carroll, Peter Lorre, John Gielgud, and Robert Young. It also features uncredited appearances by Michael Redgrave, future star of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), Michel Saint-Denis as the Coachman, and Michael Rennie in his film debut.
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The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale is a novel by Joseph Conrad, first published in 1907. The story is set in London in 1886 and deals with Mr. Adolf Verloc and his work as a spy for an unnamed country. The Secret Agent is one of Conrad's later political novels in which he moved away from his former tales of seafaring. The novel is dedicated to H. G. Wells and deals broadly with anarchism, espionage, and terrorism. It also deals with exploitation of the vulnerable in Verloc's relationship with his brother-in-law Stevie, who has an intellectual disability. Conrad’s gloomy portrait of London depicted in the novel was influenced by Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.
Dick Barton – Special Agent is a radio thriller serial that was broadcast in the BBC Light Programme between 7 October 1946 and 30 March 1951. Produced and directed by Raymond Raikes, Neil Tuson, and Charles Lefaux, it was aired in 15-minute episodes at 6.45 each weekday evening. From 11 January 1947 an additional "omnibus" edition repeated all of the week's programmes each Saturday morning between 11.00 and 12.00. In all, 711 episodes were produced and the serial achieved a peak audience of 20 million. Its end was marked by a leading article in The Times.
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Cakes and Ale, or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930) is a novel by the British author W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham exposes the misguided social snobbery levelled at the character Rosie Driffield, whose frankness, honesty, and sexual freedom make her a target of conservative opprobrium. Her character is treated favourably by the book's narrator, Ashenden, who understands that she was a muse to the many artists who surrounded her, and who himself enjoyed her sexual favours.
Louis Frank Marks was an English screenwriter and producer, mainly for BBC Television. His career began in the late 1950s and continued into the next century.
Secret Agent X-9 is a comic strip created by writer Dashiell Hammett and artist Alex Raymond. Syndicated by King Features, it ran from January 22, 1934 until February 10, 1996.
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Ashenden is a BBC1 four part TV series based on the 1927 spy novel, Ashenden: Or the British Agent, by W. Somerset Maugham, that aired from 17 November to 8 December 1991, directed by Christopher Morahan, with Alex Jennings in the title role, Joss Ackland as Cumming, Ian Bannen as 'R' and Jason Isaacs as Andrew Lehman. Guest actors included Harriet Walter as Giulia Lazzari in the first episode, Alan Bennett as Grantly Caypor in the second, René Auberjonois as John Quincy Harrington in the third, with Elizabeth McGovern as Aileen Sommerville and Alfred Molina as Carmona, the titular character, in the final story. A framing device at the start of each episode shows progressively more of an aged Ashenden living in France in the mid-1960s, reacting adversely to a piece of music on the radio. The final episode – which gives the context to this section – closes with a return to this "future" setting.
A Shilling for Candles is a 1936 mystery novel by Josephine Tey about the investigation of the drowning of a film actress, known as Christine Clay. It is the second of Tey's five mysteries featuring Inspector Alan Grant, and the first book written under the Josephine Tey pseudonym. The plot draws extensively on Tey's experience in working with actors in her play Richard of Bordeaux, which was produced in London's West End in 1933 starring John Gielgud and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, and on her work as a contract writer in Hollywood.
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The playwright, novelist and short-story writer W. Somerset Maugham, was a prolific author from the late 19th century until the 1960s. Most of his earliest successes were for the theatre, but he gave up writing plays after 1932. Many of his plays have been adapted for broadcasting and the cinema, as have several of his novels and short stories. The New York Times commented in 1964, "There are times when one thinks that British television and radio would have to shut up shop if there were not an apparently inexhaustible supply of stories by Maugham to turn into 30-minute plays. One recalls, too, the long list of movies that have been made from his novels − Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, The Painted Veil, The Razor's Edge and the rest.