Maugham’s best-known successors-Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré-were spies, too. tells Ashenden, “and if you get into trouble you’ll get no help.” Editors say the same thing to writers. (Maugham had French and German.) “If you do well you’ll get no thanks,” R. Writers make good joes (as Herron might say): they’re keen observers, and they tend to know languages. 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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