Ashenden or: the British Agent is a 1928 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.
A playwright called Ashenden is recruited by Colonel R., a British Intelligence officer. He is sent to Switzerland where he becomes involved in a series of adventures. In one he accompanies a man called the Hairless Mexican to Italy, where a Greek agent of the Germans is to be assassinated. In another he must get an Italian dancer to induce her Indian lover, a German agent, to cross the border into Switzerland to see her, so that Ashenden can arrest him.
It is said that Somerset Maugham modelled the character of John Ashenden after himself and Chandra Lal after Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, an Indian Nationalist in Germany during the war. 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.
It is an archetype of the espionage novel, a book to which more modern practitioners such as Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, Len Deighton, John le Carré, Robert Ludlum, and Alan Furst are indebted for its role in developing the genre.[citation needed]. An example of this is the device, which Fleming copied in the James Bond novels, of referring to the head of British Intelligence only by an initial.
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