Rogue Male

1930-something: a professional hunter is passing through an unnamed Central European country that is in the thrall of a vicious dictator. The hunter wonders whether he can penetrate undetected into the dictator’s private compound. He does. He has the potential target in his sites and is wondering whether to pull the trigger when security catches up with him. Imprisoned, tortured, doomed to a painful death, the hunter makes an extraordinary and harrowing escape, fleeing through enemy territory to the safety of his native England. But that safety is delusive: his pursuers will not be diverted from their revenge by national borders; the British government cannot protect him without seeming to endorse his deed. The hunter must flee society, and he goes literaly underground, like a fox to its earth. The hunter has become the hunted.

Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male is a classic thriller and a triumph of suspense. Described by Household as a “bastard offspring of Stevenson and Conrad,” the book is no less remarkable as an exploration of the lure of violence, the psychology of survivalism, and the call of the wild.

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.