And they behaved, I think, with discretion.” 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 550 yards, it was natural enough that they should jump to conclusions. The opening lines are highly intriguing and offer a glimpse of the nonchalant protagonist, who is rarely out of danger for the following 180 pages. Household’s book was filmed by Fritz Lang in 1941 (as Man Hunt) and there was a 1976 TV movie starring Peter O’Toole, but the novel is far superior. David Morrell, whose thriller First Blood spawned the Stallone movie series, has acknowledged the influence of Rogue Male. Without the masterpiece of suspense that is Rogue Male, we may not have had James Bond, The Day of the Jackal or even Rambo. Its classic status was affirmed last year by the publication of a handsome Folio Society edition. Twelve years earlier, this unrelenting story about an English aristocrat being pursued by resourceful foreign agents was published as part of the Crime Masterworks series alongside Dashiell Hammet, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jim Thompson. Rogue Male was reissued this summer to mark the book’s 75th anniversary. Geoffrey Household’s most famous novel is a period piece that exerts such a powerful grip on the contemporary reader it may well be the best crime thriller to be published in 2014.
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