THE PROBLEM with biographies of Somerset Maugham is that the last ten years of his life have always overwhelmed what went before them. Indeed, the man Maugham chose as his literary executor allowed Ted Morgan to write his excellent biography in 1980 in order to dispel the myths that had built up over Maugham’s “final tragic years” in his villa in the south of France.

AT NOON on Wednesday, March 28, 1894, thirty-year-old Guy T. Olmstead shot William L. Clifford in the back four times—once in his “loins” and three times in the back of his head—as Clifford walked north on Clark Street, approaching Madison Avenue in Chicago’s Loop. When the shots rang out and Clifford fell, a lunch-hour crowd burst out of local restaurants and swarmed Olmstead, who made no effort to run away. They yelled, “‘Lynch him!’” as Olmstead waved his pistol, swore, “‘I’ll never be taken alive!’” and yelled at the top of his voice, “‘Don’t take my gun; let me finish what I have to do.’”