Novelist, playwright, short-story writer, travel writer, autobiographer, and essayist, W. Somerset Maugham wrote only one collection of short stories that justifies his inclusion in any discussion of spy fiction: Ashenden; or The British Agent (1928). Statements by Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John le Carré (David Cornwell), among others, about that book's influence upon their writing of spy fiction testify to Maugham's importance to the development of that genre.

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874 and lived the first ten years of his life there. His mother died in 1882. His father, a lawyer, died in 1884. At age ten he went to live with his clergyman uncle in Kent. His unhappy attendance at an English public school (the King's School in Canterbury), his liberating year of study abroad in Heidelberg (with his concomitant loss of religious faith), and his return to England to take up medical studies...