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Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

The most thrilling thriller we’ve ever read, published in 1939 as Europe stood on the brink of war. On the first page, the unidentified narrator tries to take out Hitler with a hunting rifle. He is caught, tortured and thrown off a cliff. Amazingly he survives. He examines his injuries—”My nails are growing back but my left eye is still pretty useless…I felt as if the back of my thighs and rump had been shorn off, pulled off, scraped off—off, however done. I had parted, obviously and irrevocably, with a lot of my living matter.”

Somehow he manages to escape to his home, England, only to find that Hitler’s stooges are after him. What follows is an extraordinary pursuit story: no nail shall be left unchewed. The narrator knows he cannot hide in London and he cannot risk getting other people involved. So he takes off for open country, Dorset, but not before a breathtaking chase in the London underground. Have you seen Melville’s Samurai? This is better. Why didn’t Hitchcock film this? The adaptation by Fritz Lang doesn’t come close to the source.

After several days on the run he finds a hideout—a holloway, a sunken lane by a farm. (Robert Macfarlane went looking for that holloway.) He digs in, but he knows it’s only a matter of time before his enemies find him…

A cat (the narrator calls him Asmodeus) plays an essential role. “Asmodeus, as always, is my comfort. It is seldom that one can give to and receive from an animal close, silent and continuous attention. We live in the same space, in the same way, and on the same food, except that Asmodeus has no need for oatmeal, nor I for field-mice. During the hours while he sits cleaning himself, and I motionless in my dirt, there is, I believe, some slight though transference between us. I cannot ‘order’ or even ‘hope’ that he should perform a given act, but back and forth between us go thoughts of fear and disconnected dreams of action. I should call these dreams madness, did I not know they came from him and that his mind is, by our human standards, mad.”

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