Big Frank is reading the quintessential spy novel: Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham. While Poe is often sited as the originator of the spy novel, Maugham certainly has to be credited as the modern originator. Aside from the fact that the details of spying in the novel are supposedly based on Maugham's personal experience as a spy during WWI, there is much to recommend the book. Maugham's descriptions of his characters are pricelessly spot on; you feel like you know these people. Here are a few examples - short exerpts from longer descriptive passages:
1. The Baroness von Higgens: "The baroness gave him a flashing, brilliant smile. She was a woman of more than forty, but in a hard and glittering manner extremely beautiful. She was a high-coloured blonde with golden hair of a metallic lustre, lovely no doubt but not attractive, and Ashenden had from the first reflected that it was not the sort of hair you would like to find in your soup."
2. Miss King: "She was a tiny old woman, just a few little bones in a bag of wrinkled skin, and her face was deeply furrowed. it was obvious that she wore a wig, it was of a mousy brown, very elaborate and not always set quite straight, and she was heavily made up, with great patches of scarlet on her withered cheeks and brillinatly red lips. She dressed fantastically in gay clothes that looked as though they had been bought higgledy-piddledy from an old-clothes shop and int the day-time she wore enoromous, extravagantly girlish hats."
3. "The Hairless Mexican was a tall man, and though thinnish gave you the impression of being very powerful: he was smartly dressed in a blue serge suit, with a silk handkerchief neatly tucked in the breast pocket of hi coat, and he wore a gold bracelet on his wrist. His features were good, but a little larger than life-size, and his eyes were brown and lustrous. He was quite hairless. His yellow skin had the smoothness of a woman's and he had no eyebrows nor eyelashes; he wore a pale brown wig, rather long, and the locks were arranged in artistic disorder. This and the unwrinkled sallow face, combined with his dandified dress, gave him an appearance that was at first glance a trifle horrigying. He was repulsive and ridiculous, but you could not take your eyes from him. There was a sisister fascination in his strangeness."
