26 January 2022

Rogue Male


My sister sent me a book she picked up at the Blue Hill Library book sale, remarking that A) it had my name on it, and B) a woman she knew had written the introduction.  It’s a recent paperback edition of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, a much celebrated and compelling yarn: think The Most Dangerous Game with Nazis thrown in. 

The first and best movie version is Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt, released in 1941 - Household’s novel came out in 1939 - once you get past Walter Pidgeon in the lead.  (I’ve never bought him in anything, which includes How Green Was My Valley.)  This stumbling block aside, Man Hunt has the hugely endearing Joan Bennett – considerably less sympathetically cast in Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, two later pictures with Lang – and the impeccable George Sanders at very possibly his slimiest, outdoing even the blackmailing bottom-feeder Favell in Rebecca. 

Here’s the hook.  Pidgeon, a renowned big-game hunter, stalks Hitler in Berchtesgaden, and has him in his sights, but he’s caught before he pulls the trigger.  He’s tortured by the Gestapo to get the truth out of him.  Sanders, the most sophisticated and sadistic of the secret police detail, is convinced Pidgeon could only have been acting on instructions from British intelligence.  Pidgeon escapes, through dramatic contrivance, and gets back to England, but Sanders and his goons follow him home.  Enough spoilers.

The most significant difference between the book and the movie is that Household drops you in media res.  There’s no preamble, and no back story.  In fact, the hero, the country, and the target go unnamed – you can certainly infer that it’s Hitler, but he’s never specified.  The book opens with the guy already on the run, and the details get filled in as you go along.  All you know is that he’s being pursued by malevolent adversaries.

This is very much John Buchan territory, The Thirty-Nine Steps.  The paranoia, the noose tightening.  Which is also familiar to Fritz Lang.  Household uses a journey narrative on both the surface level and belowdecks, though.  There’s an atavistic bass note.  In the wild, paranoia is your ally, a sense of the immediate, fight or flight, whether the environment presents as hostile or tame.  Landscape can be psychic, or magicked, just as well as physical. 

This isn’t a new storyline, by any means.  Household is reinventing, or reimagining, a descent.  Beowulf goes into the cave, to face Grendel’s mom.  Orpheus challenges the god of the underworld.  When the guy in Rogue Male goes to earth, literally, like a badger or a bear, hiding in a hole in the ground, he becomes earthen, old, primal. 

Nor is this simply habit, or trope.  This is a theme, for Household.  Victoria Nelson, a Goddard scholar and the author of Gothicka and The Secret Life of Puppets, says in her introduction to this newer edition of the novel, that he’s walking back the clock.  That in order to survive against the primitive, primitive instinct has to resurface.  Old wine in new bottles, we might say.

For all that, it’s one hell of a good story. 

8 comments:

  1. A thriller that certainly does hold up!

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  2. I remember seeing Man Hunt a very long time ago, on TV. I remember it as fairly claustrophobic. But you're right, it's a very old theme, and a very old plot device - the hairbreadth escapes, the constant suspicion, etc.

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    1. Eve - The ending is literally claustrophobic, with guy hiding underground, and the heavy's comeuppance is particularly weird and fitting, like Lee Marvin's in THE BIG HEAT.

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  3. I have a copy around somewhere; it might be time to re-read it.

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  4. I have never read the book nor seen the movie, which is odd because Lang is one of my favorite directors (M!) and Household wrote one of my favorite spy stories. Like Rogue Male, the protagonist of "Keep Walking" is nameless in an unnamed country. https://lbcrimes.blogspot.com/2018/11/keep-walking-by-geoffrey-household-in.html

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    1. Rob - In the paranoid thriller genre, MAN HUNT isn't as tight as MINISTRY OF FEAR, which Lang made a couple of years later, but it's got its moments; I want to find more Household, myself.

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  5. Same as Rob… I'm familiar with all your references except Rogue Male.

    David, you said your name was on the book. In what context was it?

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    1. Leigh - I only meant in the sense that my sis thought of me as soon as she saw the book, and knew it was right up my alley.

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