THE RELUCTANT AGENT, Somerset Maugham, the Secret War, and The Making of Ashenden, David Lane intro

THE RELUCTANT AGENT. Somerset Maugham, the Secret War, and the Making of Ashenden . In 1917, the British government handed one of the most famous writers alive $21,000 in cash, a code name, and an assignment that reads like a bad joke: go to Petrograd and stop the Russian Revolution. W. Somerset Maugham was forty-three, tubercular, and spoke no Russian. He had a stammer so severe he could barely deliver a message, let alone a speech. His qualifications for espionage were a talent for watching people and a lifetime of practice at concealment — the closeted, orphaned outsider who had learned before adolescence to live under cover. British intelligence decided that was enough. It nearly was. For two years he had crossed Lake Geneva in the dark with agents' reports in his pockets, running spies into Germany while pretending to write a comedy. Now he dined weekly with Alexander Kerensky, buying the Prime Minister of Russia caviar on the Secret Service's account, cabling London that the government he'd been sent to save was already a corpse. When Kerensky pressed a final, desperate message into his keeping — memorized, too dangerous for paper — Maugham raced home aboard a destroyer to deliver it to Lloyd George in Downing Street. Days later, the Bolsheviks took the Winter Palace. The mission was ash. Maugham's verdict, delivered with a straight face: given six more months, he might have pulled it off. Out of the tedium, the absurdity, and the wreckage came Ashenden — the 1928 book that burned away a century of spy-fiction fantasy and invented the genre we know: the gray fieldman, the pitiless chief, the operation that succeeds at the cost of everything it was meant to protect. Le Carré's world begins here. So does the mystery of Maugham himself: the man who spied on everyone, revealed nothing, and turned his own double life into literature's first honest account of secret work. With an Introduction by Professor David C. Lane.