Overview

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was an English playwright and author whose clinical prose and worldly detachment shaped early modern fiction. Drawing on his own experience working for the British Secret Service, Maugham distilled the quiet dread of espionage into stories that read less like fiction and more like confession. Teeming with quiet realism and psychological depth, ""The Hairless Mexican"" is one such confessional. This compact tale sees British agent Ashenden paired with a professional assassin to eliminate a German courier in wartime Italy. The eponymous hitman - bald, flamboyant, and disturbingly efficient - executes his task with a detachment that unnerves even the seasoned spy. What unfolds is not a thriller but a study in cold precision, where duty trumps empathy, and the machinery of war leaves no room for sentiment. This is Maugham's memo from the trenches of spycraft: a meditation on the wages of secrecy, a portrait of calculated violence, and a parable of precision gone sideways, where the devil is not in the details but in the dispatch.

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Reviews

""A breath-catcher."" -The New York Times ""Thrilling and absorbing."" -Louisville Times ""Provides some highly delicious entertainment . . . the Hairless Mexican - this character is so extraordinary a creation that he is worth the price of the book."" -The Buffalo Times ""The author of Of Human Bondage is at his best in portraying the multitude of types encountered in the dangerous and stealthy work of espionage."" -Fort Worth Star-Telegram ""A sharply etched, often tense account of some of the important things that happen far away from battlefields when nations go to war."" -The Philadelphia Inquirer ""There is no question that the character portrayal of the hairless Mexican . . . stands out as of paramount interest - a man to revolt, to startle and disgust, but never to bore."" -The Houston Post ""Ashenden, the British secret agent, is one of Maugham's most striking characterizations . . . It is not difficult to see that he has fashioned his book from the stuff of his own experience."" -The Houston Chronicle ""Less than a novel . . . more than a thriller. Just when one is on the point of remarking how ingeniously a dramatic situation is contrived in this story, or how strikingly a character is invented, the thought suggest itself that perhaps, after all, the dramatic situation, the striking character, were realities and that Mr. Maugham has not much changed them. His 'Hairless Mexican, ' so perfectly undertaking murder in order that a few scraps of paper shall go to London instead of Berlin, would be impressive but incredible in any other story."" -Harold A. Small, San Francisco Chronicle

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