During the war, Maugham had been a spook he was recruited after “Of Human Bondage” came out. In 1927, W. Somerset Maugham wrote “Ashenden: or, The British Agent,” about a writer who is recruited into British intelligence by a handler called R. Spy fiction got good and going in the years before the First World War, and took flight afterward. He has never been a secret agent, except insofar as all writers are spies and maybe, lately, so is everyone else. He does not drive a car and he does not own a smartphone, and, in the softly carpeted apartment in Oxford where, wearing woollen slippers, he writes spy novels-the best in a generation, by some estimations, and irrefutably the funniest-he does not have Wi-Fi. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and he is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony. Mick Herron is a broad-shouldered Englishman with close-cropped black hair, lightly salted, and fine and long-fingered hands, like a pianist’s or a safecracker’s.
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