Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, Victoria Nelson (Introduction)

The Barnes & Noble Review

Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male is one of the great, heart-imperiling suspense stories of all time, and yet -- does it bump off all its admirers? -- it seems to be forever going out of print. Now this truly literate thriller, whose fine writing amplifies the sense of excruciating predicament, is back again to fry the nerves of another generation of readers. First published in 1939 (and later made into the 1941 film Man Hunt), the book begins in a Europe infested with dictators, one of whom our hero, an Englishman skilled at hunting, attempts to assassinate. After being caught and tortured, he is thrown off a cliff to his apparent death. But lo! he survives, battered but tenacious, and the hunt for the hunter is on. His pursuers -- a rum lot ranging from a dull brute to an insidious would-be gentleman of malign foreign make -- chase him across the English Channel, into Dorset, and to ground in a hollowed-out bank verging an ancient, hawthorn-hedged lane. There, prey to "carrion thought" though he may be, he rouses himself to further prodigies of resourcefulness and a stab at revenge. What we have here is an existential meditation on the animal within and the nature of freedom, as well as -- don't look so glum -- an absolutely blood-curdling tale of foul duplicity and vicious expedient, an enthralling portrayal of endurance and ingenuity, and a moving celebration of nature and the English countryside. --Katherine A. Powers

Synopsis

Passing through a foreign country, a professional big game hunter finds himself wondering whether he might be able to infiltrate the local dictator’s compound, target the dictator,
perhaps take him down. He has his target in his sites—should he follow through?—when he is seized by security, imprisoned, tortured, and condemned to death. And yet he escapes. He flees though enemy territory and succeeds at last in reaching his native England, only to realize that at home, too, he cannot be safe: a mere border will not divert his pursuers from their revenge; the British government cannot protect him without seeming to endorse his actions. He has no chance but to go under the radar, to find a spot for himself outside the bounds of society, to retreat as a fox does to its earth. He is a hunter. Who should know better how to escape pursuit? Soon, however, our hero discovers that he is dealing with men who are no less out of the ordinary than he is.

Geoffrey Household’s masterly command of suspense is everywhere evident in the pages of Rogue Male. At the same time, the book—described by the author as a “bastard offspring of Stevenson and Conrad”—is an astonishing exploration of the lure of violence, the psychology of survivalism, and the call of the wild.

Biography

Geoffrey Household (1900—1988) was born in Bristol and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He worked all over the world, including Eastern Europe, the US, the Middle East and South America as, among other things, a banker, a salesman, and an encyclopedia writer. He served in British intelligence in World War II. His other works include A Rough Shoot, Watcher in the Shadows, Rogue Justice and an autobiography, Against the Wind.