What You Need to Know
Hitchcock’s Secret Agent is a loose adaptation of Maugham’s short stories, “The Traitor” and “The Hairless Mexican,” starring John Gielgud as Ashenden (whose “real” name is Edgar Brodie), and Peter Lorre as The General.
Ashenden: Or the British Agent is a 1927 collection of loosely linked stories, partly based on the author’s experience as a member of British Intelligence in Europe during WWI.
During the First World War, writer Ashenden, referenced only by surname, is enlisted as agent through threats and promises by “R,” a Colonel with British Intelligence.
Sent to Switzerland where he becomes involved in a number of counter-intelligence operations, he does not use a weapon, instead relying on means of persuasion, bribery, blackmail–or coincidence.
In one, he accompanies a man known as “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 ship, and during search of the Greek’s hotel room, he and Ashenden do not find any papers. Ashenden then decodes a cable informing that the intended Greek had never boarded the ship. The 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 German agent, by convincing him to cross the border from neutral Switzerland to see her in allied France, where the Allies would arrest him.
After the man is captured by the British, he commits suicide before being arrested and executed. When she finds out of his death, the dancer asks to get back the valuable watch she had given to the man whom she has just betrayed.
Ashenden is sent to Imperial Russia during the 1917 revolution, as an “agent of influence,” to keep Russia in war against Germany. He spends 11 days on the train from Vladivostok to Petrograd sharing a cabin with Harrington, a chatty American businessman.
When the revolution breaks out, they try to evacuate, the businessman insists on getting back his laundry, during which Harrington is killed in street riot.
The stories combine Maugham’s skills at constructing character detail, showing how an affecting person could be damaged in the game of national spying.
Some regard these as the forerunner of the spy fiction written by Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and books such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which was made int a successful movie by Martin Ritt in 1965.
