In this, the third volume of my collected stories, I have made a somewhat different arrangement from that which I have made in the others. In those I put the stories I wrote in which the scene was laid in Malaya. These are so long that I thought it would give the reader a rest if I interspersed them with short ones set in other parts of the world, so I divided them in each volume into groups. But I wrote a batch of stories dealing with the adventures of an agent in the Intelligence Department during the First World War. I gave him the name of Ashenden. Since they are connected by this character of my invention I have thought it well, notwithstanding their great length, to put them all together. They are founded on experiences of my own during that war, but I should like to impress upon the reader that they are not what the French call reportage, but works of fiction. Fact, as I said in the preface to the volume in which these stories appeared, is a poor story-teller. It starts at haphazard long before the beginning, rambles on inconsequently, and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion. The works of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for short stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it coherent, dramatic, and probable. That is what I have tried to do in this particular series.

W. Somerset Maugham: Collected Short Stories. Volume 3. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1969 [1963]), p. 7.