W. Somerset Maugham - Best Short Stories

Back in 2022, I picked a collection of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham for the Back to the Classics challenge. I decided to read it slowly, starting in January, and enjoy each story before plunging on to the next. This strategy backfired in that I read it so slowly that I only finished it up earlier this month.

17 stories, 456 pages, 18 months, but what great stories! 

Mostly set in the years between the wars, these stories chronicle the last days of the British Empire although a few are set in England as well. This is a world of civil servants and actual servants, following protocol, dressing for dinner, and lives spent mostly in quiet desperation. But don't let that turn you off. The prose is elegant and precise. Maugham is a master of the genre, often twisting the knife as the curtain comes down.

Here's a deep dive into the first story, which I just reread.

The Letter - set in Singapore, after WWI. The wife of a rubber plantation owner in the neighboring Dutch East Indies confesses to murdering a neighbor who tried to rape her while her husband was away on business and the lawyer handling the case begins to doubt her story. Very much a picture of colonial life in which the local people work it out so that they hold the cards in a very quietly masterful way. The story shows how the oppressed get their own back, and how manipulation can be a double-edged sword.

Mr Joyce is the lawyer in Singapore. Leslie Crosbie is the woman who confessed to the murder of Geoffrey Hammond, and Robert Crosbie is her husband. Leslie is elegant rather than pretty; she has an abundance of pale hair. She is quiet and does lace. Robert Crosbie is robust and plays tennis to relax. Geoff was injured in WWI and had a limp that ended his dancing days. The Chinese clerk working for Mr Joyce tells the lawyer that a friend of his has a letter that Leslie wrote to Geoff, implicating them in an affair, and he says the friend would be willing to sell the letter. What should Mr Joyce do? He faces an ethical dilemma in that he could be hiding evidence that could sway the jury with regards to whether Leslie's killing of Geoffrey was self-defense.

Maugham developed The Letter into a play shortly after publishing it in a short story collection in 1926, and it has been adapted for both film and TV a few times as well as a musical and an opera. I can see why--in the end, a very chilling story that is unsettling.

Other stories in the collection are The Verger, The Vessel of Wrath, The Hairless Mexican, Mr. Harrington's Washing, Red, Mr. Know-All, The Alien Corn, The Book-Bay, The Round Dozen, The Voice of the Turtle, The Facts of Life, Lord Mountdrago, The Colonel's Lady, Rain, P. & O. 

I have a feeling I will be picking up this volume from time to time when I am in the mood for a bit of Maugham.