Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Geoffrey Household - Rogue Male
The December 2007 issue of Men's Journal included a list of the 15 best thrillers ever written*. I was somewhat chagrined that I had only read four of them (I've seen movie versions of six...), and more so that I had never heard of the one in the top position—Rogue Male—or of its author—Geoffrey Household (1900-1988). Probably that it was published in 1939 had something to do with my ignorance of it. And it has just been brought back into print by the estimable New York Review Books (that also reprinted the #14 book on the list Red Lights by Georges Simenon, BTW) with an introduction by Victoria Nelson.
Household worked for the United Fruit Company and the Bank of Romania before World War II, and for British intelligence during it. The dull thriller "Arabesque" was based on one of Household's many other novels.
Household characterized his writing as a "bastard offspring of Stevenson and Conrad," though the writer who most easily came to my mind while reading it were John Buchan (The 39 Steps), Eric Ambler (Journey Into Fear), and Rudyard Kipling (Kim and more jingoistic, lesser works). It is a memoir by a rich British sportsman who takes it into his head to see what hunting for Really Big Game would be like.
His quarry is the dictator of a central European country in his mountain retreat — clearly Adolf Hitler in the Bavarian Alps, even though names are not named. The English hunter gets the dictator in the telescopic sites of his hunting rifle (at a distance of 550 yards), but is tackled by a guard with whom he had been toying. (This is the first instance of cat-and-mouse play in which the mouse triumphs.)
That he was just seeing what it would be like to hunt such quarry is not believed by the security forces. The hunter is tortured and then discarded over a cliff. There would be no story if he did not survive, and there is no body when the security forces go to dispose of it the next morning.
Suffering from multiple injuries, he manages to escape back to England. Concerned that the government not be blamed for his lunatic game, he goes into hiding. There are some more chases across London (he kills an agent in the London Subway) and the Midlands countryside, where he had spent months underground. Determined Nazi agents ferret his burrow. We might say that he is like a gunning badger, more than a match for any ferret.
The premise is pretty absurd (premises: both seeing whether he could assassinate the dictator and surviving the interrogation following his capture), but the mix of survivalism, chase scenes, and ironic views of various worlds make for absorbing reading, even having to get through periodic bouts of the smugness of the English upper class. For my tastes, there is too much on the details of surviving in his burrow. I like the chases better — and there are many.
BTW, Rogue Male was adapted for the screen by Dudley Nichols and directed by Fritz Land in 1941 as "Man Hunt," starring Walter Pidgeon and George Sanders; and, adapted by Frederic Raphael for BBC, was made into a 1976 tv movie ("Rogue Male") starring Peter O'Toole, Alastair Sim, and Harold Pinter. Allegedly, it is O'Toole's favorite among the movies he has made.
*The rest of the list: 2. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre 3. Kill Shot by Elmore Leonard 4. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler 5. The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry 6. The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill 7. Freedomland by Richard Price 8. The Deep Blue Goodbye by John D. MacDonald 9. Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone 10. The ThirtybyNine Steps by John Buchan 11. Hard Revolution by George Pelecanos 12. The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley 13. From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming 14. Red Lights by Georges Simenon 15. Havana by Stephen Hunter (Don't blame me for inclusions or exclusions or ask me to explain what the boundaries of "thriller" are!)
I don't know about "endearing" (perhaps to some), Rogue Male is a classic celebration of English pluck, so Barbara may pluck it for her French & English writeoff.
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