Maugham's the word: Why Somerset is set for a comeback

Somerset Maugham, seen here in 1939, was daring and ahead of his time. Photograph: Eric Schaal/Getty

The fabulously unfashionable Somerset Maugham is having a little cultural fillip. A gleaming film version of The Painted Veil is playing at a cinema near you (apparently entirely due to the dogged love of its leading man, Edward Norton). The Letter has stormed triumphantly into the West End.

Maugham was blisteringly successful in his day and is now hardly read. If he is thought of at all, it is as a creaking reminder of distant colonial days - all those stories of the Orient, the smart ladies, the stiff upper lip. His reputation can hardly have been burnished when Jeffrey Archer blatantly lifted the short story, The Luncheon, for A Quiver Full of Arrows. Homage from Lord Archer? Instant literary death.

Sam Jordison has written eloquently on this blog about the lost writers, specifically RF Delderfield - also huge in his day, and now quite forgotten. But Delderfield was a product entirely of his time, and his perfect green England, dated prose and old-fashioned view of women make him grate on modern sensibilities.

Maugham's outmoded status is harder to explain. It is as if some arcane reverse spin has been at work. Charles Spencer, reviewing The Letter, was astonished to find that it was not the "mildewed period piece" he had expected. Anthony Andrews plays the upright but sexually ambivalent lawyer; in a thoughtful interview, he said The Letter is the only play he knows where what is not said is more important than what is: in those silences lie all the things that could not be spoken aloud in 1928. This is high subtlety, but through Andrews' admiration you can hear the batsqueak of surprise, as if Maugham was not supposed to be this way.

Of Human Bondage was generally considered the big book, but for me it is The Razor's Edge that races away from the pack. It wears its age lightly; the clean, lucid prose feels cool and fresh. It saved me once, when I was prancing about on the Left Bank with some absurd idea of being a Young Lady Novelist abroad, only to find myself utterly cowed by the disdainful looks the waiters hurled at a solitary female. It was drizzling; Paris was grey and sullen; I could not find the ghosts of Hemingway or Sartre anywhere. I ran into WH Smith on the Rue de Rivoli, and bought The Razor's Edge for no reason I can remember; I do recall vividly the intoxicating effect of it, so brilliant and gripping that I no longer cared about the rain, or the grumpy waiters, or the horrible candlewick bedspread in my cheap hotel.

Perhaps this will be the start of a Maugham revival, and modern readers will realise that he is not fusty and antiquated, but rather daring and ahead of his time. There are stirrings out in the blogosphere. "Cakes and Ale and The Moon and Sixpence are subdued masterpieces yet he don't get no respect,' was one pithy comment. I could not have put it better myself. Go, Willie!