Ashenden: Or the British Agent

"Maugham's emphasis on the mundane details of his agents' lives, as well as the frequently trivial and venal reasons for their involvement, places the Ashenden stories closer in tone and significance to Joseph Conrad's pre-war spy novel, 'The Secret Agent', and the later work of John le Carre than to the derring-do of the Richard Hannay adventures of his contemporary John Buchan or to the fiction of Ian Fleming. Ashenden is clearly no James Bond....[Maugham] had heard that [reading the Ashenden stories] was required for those entering intelligence service....Ashenden remains as dimly unaware of the consequences of his actions as do the men and women who lie, steal, and even die for distant causes they only obscurely comprehend. If it is true that fledgling agents read these stories to prepare for a life of espionage, they could not have read them very carefully."W. Somerset Maugham is the author of 'Ashenden: Or the British Agent', published 2005 under ISBN 9780891902133 and ISBN 0891902139.