Only to find that foreign agents are still searching for him to shut him up permanently and to make sure no one else gets the idea of taking a potshot at the great man. “An outlaw in my own country”Īgainst great odds, the hunted man makes his arduous and painful way across Europe and gets back to England…. That suited me well enough, so I fainted again. When I climbed into the narrowing cone and the boughs were thicker and smaller and greener, I got jammed. I couldn’t fall, wedged in as I was between the little branches of that prolific tree. My legs were not limp they were immovable. At one point early in his flight, weak from interrogation and deeply injured from what he has inflicted on himself in getting away, he is hiding in a tree.

Instead, he effects an escape with great skill, cleverness and suffering. And, to that end, he knows he will be killed. It was, as the hunter describes it in these opening pages, a lark, a dangerous lark, one that those who have captured him will never permit to be made public. They didn’t believe me, though they were beginning to understand that a bored and wealthy Englishman who had hunted all commoner game might well find a perverse pleasure in hunting the biggest game on earth. After all, one doesn’t need a telescopic sight to shoot boar and bear so that when they came on me watching the terrace at a range of five hundred and fifty yards, it was natural enough that they should jump to conclusions….

He had no desire, he says, to actually pull the trigger.

He’s a big game hunter who tells the reader in the book’s opening pages that he wanted to stalk an even tougher target - but only in a “formal” hunt, not a real one. In other words, a prime target for a quixotic assassin.Īlthough this rifleman denies being an assassin. Already, the Nazi leader had blackmailed the West into permitting him to invade the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia and, later in 1939, would start World War II by invading Poland. Household never says so, but it seems pretty certain that the contemporary English reader was expected to understand that this “great man” was none other than Adolf Hitler. An unnamed upper-class Englishman has been found in a foreign country with a high-powered rifle, equipped with a telescopic sight, pointed at the country’s “great man.” Normally, a hunted human being is too preoccupied and frantic to take the time to tell the story of the hunt, and that’s initially the case here.

Published on January 1, 1939, Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male crackles with tension and action, heightened by an unusual point of view - the perspective of a hunted man.

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household