Books Acquired:
The Intercom Conspiracy, Eric Ambler
Ashenden, or the British Agent, W. Somerset Maugham

Books Offloaded:
Epitaph for a Spy, Eric Ambler
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan

Progress Made:
David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God, Peter Ormerod

Books Finished:
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
Ashenden, or the British Agent, W. Somerset Maugham
Bretherton, W.F. Morris

Ashenden was well aware that he would never know what happened then. Being no more than a tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine, he never had the advantage of seeing a completed action. He was concerned with the beginning or the end of it, perhaps, or with some incident in the middle, but what his own doings led to he had seldom a chance of discovering. It was as unsatisfactory as those modern novels that give you a number of unrelated episodes and expect you by piecing them together to construct in your mind a connected narrative.
—W.S. Maugham, Ashenden

This vein of British espionage novels that I’ve hit is a rich one. These are the kinds of books that I find myself reading, not just to the exclusion of all other books, but to the exclusion of all other life activities. Possibly I have a wee bit of a problem, but I can quit anytime I want to, I swear.

I was struck by this passage from John Keegan’s introduction to The Thirty-Nine Steps:

“It was one of those days,” a friend said, “when the only thing to do was read John Buchan.” I knew at once what was meant. We all know days when the small irritations of life conspire to prevent one settling to anything. There is work to be done but no motivation, arrangements to be made but no impulse. Letters lie accusingly unanswered. A vague sense of unease pervades one’s being. An inner voice tells one to snap out of it. The will to alter one’s mood is inexplicably absent.

There is a very English recipe for dealing with this condition — fresh air, physical exercise, direct contact with nature. Getting out of oneself is the cure, particularly to hills, cliffs, high tops, where the turf is springy and the views stretch to distant, blue horizons. Oppressive days come, however, when such escapes may not offer. City streets and crowds surround, unyielding pavements meet one’s foot, horizons can only be imagined. At such times, Buchan opens the door to the world one’s being seeks — a world of thickets refreshed by a recent rain shower, of streams tinkling over boulders smoothed by uncountable winter floods, of the sharp cry of an unseen bird in a bush, of peat smoke rising lazily from a cottage chimney in the calm evening air, a world of nature utterly at peace and yet — here is the key Buchan ingredient — tinged with the menace of man the enemy.

Or to put it another way, who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it seem worthwhile? He can.

Buchan was a personage of no small stature. Says Wikipedia:

As a youth, Buchan began writing poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, publishing his first novel in 1895 and ultimately writing over a hundred books of which the best known is The Thirty-Nine Steps. After attending Glasgow and Oxford universities, he practised as a barrister. In 1901, he served as a private secretary to Lord Milner in southern Africa towards the end of the Boer War. He returned to England in 1903, continued as a barrister and journalist. He left the Bar when he joined Thomas Nelson and Sons publishers in 1907. During the First World War, he was, among other activities, Director of Information in 1917 and later Head of Intelligence at the newly formed Ministry of Information. He was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities in 1927.

In 1935, King George V, on the advice of Canadian Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, appointed Buchan to succeed the Earl of Bessborough as Governor General of Canada and two months later raised him to the peerage as Baron Tweedsmuir.

That’s right, Baron Tweedsmuir. Not exactly a lightweight.

The Thirty-Nine Steps was a joy and over too soon — at barely a hundred tightly plotted pages, it moves along smartly and still finds time for the occasional pastoral interlude. Buchan is not a great prose stylist, but his terse approach has a certain elegance, and there’s something to be said for economy.

39 has been adapted many times for theater, radio, and movies (including one by Alfred Hitchcock). There’s also a video game and an “interactive fiction” published by Penguin Books. A Netflix miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch was announced in 2021, but doesn’t seem to have actually been made; IMDB says it is still in development.

The fact that Buchan wrote over a hundred books opens up a whole other rabbit hole for me to go down, and I had really only gotten started with Ambler (reading 3 of his 18 novels) when I took this detour into things he recommended. But it’s a comfort to know this seam won’t be exhausted anytime soon.

Is there a more British name in all of literature than W. Somerset Maugham? (The “W.” stands for William; and what the fuck is wrong with “William,” I ask you? Wikipedia says that “he never greatly liked his middle name” — so why did he slap it on the cover of all his books? — and “was known by family and friends throughout his life as ‘Willie.’”)

Ashenden was a top-drawer read, a rare and precious example of the Real Writer dabbling in spy fiction. Unfortunately it’s his only book of the type. I do have a copy of Willie’s The Razor’s Edge sitting in my pile, so maybe it will get queued up sometime soon.

Ashenden himself, the protagonist, is a thinly veiled version of Maugham, who did indeed work for British intelligence during WWI. He was apparently one of the inspirations for James Bond; though not much of a ladies man, Ashenden is refined, stylish, and droll:

Nothing is so foolish as to ascribe profundity to what on the surface is merely inept; it is a pitfall into which many an ingenuous reviewer has fallen headlong: Ashenden had a confident belief in the stupidity of the human animal, which in the course of his life has stood him in good stead.

But like Bond, Ashenden is also the dangerous type — he’s not totally amoral, but he doesn’t seem to lose much sleep over the nasty things his job requires him to do. I’m not sure if this makes him a relic, absolutely modern, or timeless.

Ashenden was also made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, 1936’s Secret Agent, starring John Gielgud and Peter Lorre. Add it to the list.

Meanwhile, Bretherton may have been the best of the lot. It’s fairly experimental as war fiction goes, beginning at the end and embracing multiple points of view. The question is not what’s going to happen but how it happened — but somehow Morris manages to extract maximum suspense from this. He also writes with an impressive mixture of technical exactitude and lyrical flair; here’s a paragraph that caught my eye for whatever reason:

Men came and went in the mushroom town. A man in shirtsleeves sitting on an upturned bucket peeled potatoes into a large iron dixie and whistled a slow, lugubrious tune. Two men in shirt-sleeves and steel helmets were fusing a box of Mills grenades. A kilted piper marched to and fro like an automaton playing some skirling pibroch of the Highlands; and near his beat sat a sunburnt man, naked to the waist, plying needle and thread on a gray army shirt and proclaiming in song that the lady of his affection had an eye of glass but a heart of gold.

And I could go on but this thing is already too long and I want to get it posted just in case the world ends tonight. Our psycho president is threatening to unleash Armageddon in a few hours, and while he’s probably full of shit again, you never know. Possibly the only ones reading this will be mutant cockroaches of the future… in which case, hi cockroaches, and thanks for your time.