Geoffrey Edward West Household (November 30, 1900 — October 4, 1988) was a prolific British novelist who specialized in thrillers. He is best known for his 1939 novel Rogue Male.

Personal Life

He was born in Bristol ; his father Horace W. Household, was a lawyer. Geoffrey was educated at Clifton College, Bristol (1914-1919) and at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he received a B.A. in English literature in 1922. He became an assistant confidential secretary for Bank of Romania, in Bucharest (1922-1926). In 1926, he went to Spain, where he worked selling bananas as a marketing manager for the United Fruit Company^[1] (Elders and Fyffes). In 1929, Household moved to the United States where he wrote for children's encyclopedias and composed children's radio plays for the Columbia Broadcasting System.^[2] From 1933 to 1939 he was a traveling salesman for John Kidd, a manufacturer of printing ink, in Europe, the Middle East, and South America. He served in British Intelligence during World War II^[3] in Romania, Greece and the Middle East.

He married twice, secondly in 1942 to Ilona Zsoldos-Gutman, by whom he had a son and two daughters.

After the War, he lived the life of a 'country gentleman' and wrote. He died in Banbury, Oxfordshire. ^[4]

Writings

He began to write in the 1920s. His first short story, The Salvation of Pisco Gabar was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1936; his first novel The Terror of Villadonga was published that same year. His 1958 autobiography is entitled Against the Wind (1958).

Many of his stories have scenes set in caves, and there is a science-fiction or supernatural element in some, although this is handled with restraint. The typical Household hero was a strong, capable Englishman with a high sense of honour which bound him to a certain course of action. He described himself, as a writer, as sort of a bastard by Stevenson out of Conrad... Style is enormously important to me and I do try to develop my hero as a human being in trouble.^[5]

Indiana University holds a collection of Household's manuscripts and correspendence.^[6]

Novels

• The Terror of Villadonga (1936) aka The Spanish Cave
• The Third Hour (1937)
• Rogue Male (1939) filmed as Man Hunt (1941)
• Arabesque (1948)
• The High Place (1950)
• A Rough Shoot (1951) aka Shoot First
• A Time to Kill (1951)
• The Exploits of Xenophon (1955) aka Xenophon's Adventure
• Fellow Passenger (1955) aka Hang the Moon High
• Watcher in the Shadows (1960) filmed as Deadly Harvest' (1972)'
• Thing to Love (1963)
• Olura (1965)
• Sabres on the Sand (1966)
• The Courtesy of Death (1967)
• Prisoner of the Indies (1967)
• Dance of the Dwarfs (1968) filmed as The Adversary (1983)
• Doom's Caravan (1971)
• The Three Sentinels (1972)
• The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (1973)
• Red Anger (1975)
• The Cats to Come (1975)
• Escape into Daylight (1976)
• Hostage London: The Diary of Julian Despard (1977)
• The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac (1978)
• The Sending (1980)
• Summon the Bright Water (1981)
• Rogue Justice (1982; a sequel to Rogue Male)
• Arrows of Desire (1985)
• The Days of Your Fathers (1987)
• Face to the Sun (1988)

Rogue Male

Rogue Male is a classic thriller of the 1930s, about a British sportsman (like Richard Hannay, hero of several John Buchan novels) who for personal reasons attempts to shoot a European dictator, obviously modelled on Adolf Hitler. This attempt fails and the anonymous hero is hunted down in England, eventually trapped in an underground burrow. The book was filmed in Hollywood in 1941 as Man Hunt, starring Walter Pidgeon and George Sanders, and as Rogue Male in 1976 for BBC TV, starring Peter O'Toole and Alistair Sim.

The book influenced David Morrell's first novel, the 1972 'hunted man' action thriller First Blood, which spawned the Rambo movie series. Morrell has acknowledged the debt in several interviews, including: "When I started First Blood back in 1968, I was deeply influenced by Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male"^[7]

Short Story Collections

• The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories (1938)
• Tales of Adventurers (1952)
• The Brides of Solomon and Other Stories (1958)
• The Europe That Was (1979)
• Capricorn and Cancer (1981)

References

Sources

• The Lives and Times of Geoffey Household by Michael Barber, in Books and Bookmen (January 1974)
• St James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, ed. by Jay P. Pederson (1996)
• World Authors 1900-1950, vol. 2, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996)

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