Somerset Maugham’s “Footprints in the Jungle” is the story of treachery, adultery, betrayal and cold-blooded murder for the express purpose of achieving nothing more than eliminating an inconvenience. Originally published in 1927, it would be republished half a decade later in a collection of similar stories by Maugham titled Ah King! In fact, the stories are similar in that they all share the same colonial setting and deal primarily with British problems of trying to run empire. The collection consists of six stories and “Footprints in the Jungle” is the only one that really stands out from the rest. Not by virtue of aesthetics, but rather by virtue of narrative: the myriad offenses against the law, nature, the state and British sensibilities that drive the others are all dealt with in a way that ensures at least some measure of justice has prevailed and been meted out.
By contrast, the murderous couple at the center of the “Footprints in the Jungle” get away with it and live, one assumes, happily ever after. Making this all the more astonishing for a story written during that time is that they do not get away with because their guilt is never suspected or investigated. In fact, more than enough circumstantial evidence is collected by the colonial Head of Police to convince a jury so predisposed of the guilt of the suspects. What the policeman lacks is hard evidence and focus of attention that lapsed since the crime took place a year before. Once notorious and the topic of nightly conversation, the murder has long since been forgotten as the focus of attention has moved on.
The fact that a seemingly respectable British couple (the most pleasant couple on the island) could get away with murdering not some local indigenous brown-skinned laborer, but one of their own is astonishing enough, but as the commercials say: wait, there’s more! Maugham was notorious for taking actual real life incidents and transforming into fiction; sometimes thinly veiled and sometimes more energetically fictionalize. Not only does “Footprints in the Jungle” fall into the category of the former, but it is actually one the most thinly veiled stories in the entire Maugham canon. As was often the case with Maugham, he heard the story from an acquaintance and realized it was a crackerjack tale that pretty much wrote itself. Very little is changed from the story he was told except for details and characterization to flesh it out and avoid a lawsuit.
Maugham’s most famous short story based on one of these tales he heard from an acquaintance is “Rain” which gave the world one of his most famous character, the unapologetically sensuous Miss Sadie Thompson. These two stories are hardly anomalies: his novel The Moon and the Sixpence is a slightly more thickly veiled story of the life of Paul Gauguin and what many consider his finest accomplishment, The Razor’s Edge, belongs to that side of the spectrum in which there is more fiction than fact, but which was inspired by a real life story, although the inspiration for his main character has never been definitely established.
The fact that Maugham was a very popular writer and that he made no secret that many of his stories were hardly examples of the creative spirit sparked from some mystical place within his mind perhaps is the reason that he not only felt comfortable with not bringing the murderers to justice, but that nobody else seemed particularly enraged by it. James Cain’s iconic example of gritty noir fiction, The Postman Always Rings Twice tells a somewhat similar story of lovers who conspire to get rid of an inconvenient husband and it was published just one year after this story reappeared in Ah King! Cain was not a writer to shy away from controversy in his fiction, but even he felt compelled to bring his two murderers to two different, yet appropriate, forms of justice. Somerset Maugham is rarely mentioned among writers of noir or even crime fiction, but at least in this case it would appear he was even grittier at heart than America’s most hardboiled authors of the time.
But wait, there’s more! You know that he allowed his murderers to get away and apparently live happily ever after. But, surely, you may be thinking, that happily ever after was at least tempered by bouts of remorse and guilt?
Think again. When Somerset Maugham decided to go all in on hardboiled, he left that pot on the burner for days!
