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. The chapters are collected in later collections under different titles, as below. It is unknown whether they were rewritten slightly from original publication. 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.
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