A Household Name?

Have you come across the author Geoffrey Household? He was an amazing guy, born in 1900, died in 1988 - and as well as writing, his  career also included training as a banker in Bucharest, selling bananas in Spain, serving as a security officer in WW2...He was passionate about cats, gardens, Spanish Rioja and pipe-smoking - a quintessential Englishman with a glamourous Romanian wife. He wrote 37 novels, numerous short stories and a few children's books. 

I first came across GH in the late 1970's, when his book "Rogue Male" was made into a film for the BBC, starring Peter O Toole. I thought the plot was brilliant and found a secondhand copy of the book, which I read, and re-read till it fell to bits. GH wrote it in the late 1930s. Told in the first person, it is the story of an aristocratic Englishman who makes a failed solo attempt at assassinating a 

particularly evil European dictator. He escapes captivity, and gets back to England where he hides from foreign agents seeking to capture and kill him.

Having grown up in Dorset, our hero returns there, and digs himself into a sandstone tunnel at the end of a country lane in a remote woodland area. Radio 4 commissioned a audio version of the [abridged] book, which was first broadcast in 1989, and starred Simon Cadell. Then in 2004, Michael Jayston read the whole book [15 halfhour episodes] 
During March 2026, to mark the 30th anniversary of Cadell's death, R4extra re-broadcast his Rogue Male. For the next few weeks you can hear Michael Jayston reading the sequel, Rogue Justice [which Household wrote in 1982, 40 years after the first book] 
Household was an extremely prescient guy - living in Europe in the 1930s, he watched Hitler's rise to power. He was aware of what Adolf was capable of, long before many others.  He hated the Nazi regime with a passion. This  inspired his Rogue Male story. It is considered to have inspired Fleming's Bond, David Morell's Rambo, Forsyth's Jackal, and a number of other action-hero books. 

Just before we moved to Dorset, author Robert McFarlane set out to find the "Hollow-way" where Household's hero hid, although GH had said it was not marked on any OS maps. He failed! But since we left the area [typical!] another author, Sara Hudson, claims to have located the spot.  One day I might get back...

It is a cracking adventure story, a true classic, and I think Geoffrey Household deserves better recognition. 

I recommend you get ahead of the game, and read Rogue Male now. If only because the lovely Benedict [Sherlock etc] Cumberbatch is busy making a new film version!
Have you read Rogue Male?

Do you remember the Peter O Toole film?