The identity of the protagonist’s target is kept carefully hidden, with very few clues throughout the novel, but it’s not difficult to guess who it was supposed to be and Household later confirmed that it was Hitler. Staying in London is obviously now out of the question, so he heads for the Dorset countryside where he is sure his pursuers will never be able to find him. On his arrival, he discovers that agents of the dictator he’d tried to shoot have followed him to England. Somehow, he survives and manages to make his way back to London. Despite insisting that he wasn’t planning to pull the trigger and was just enjoying the thrill of ‘hunting the biggest game on earth’, the narrator is tortured and thrown over a cliff, where he is left to die.

The novel opens in 1938 just after our narrator has been caught aiming a gun at the dictator of an unspecified European country. It sounded very like The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, which I thought was fun, if a bit repetitive, but while there are definitely some similarities, I found Rogue Male a more satisfying book. Not knowing much about it, I had added it to my Classics Club list after seeing it included in The Guardian’s Top 10 novels of the 1930s. Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel, Rogue Male, was the book selected for me in the recent Classics Club Spin. As a change of pace from rather more sophisticated modern thrillers I really enjoyed it but if you are are put off by a lower audio quality it's worth listening to the sample before you buy. However, it's like looking back in history to that bygone age and as you hear the lead complain about his appearance having 'the added villainy of whiskers' it brings that earlier gentrified world fully into your ears. It's actually a quite bizarre tale and sometimes omits obvious olfactory implications of the situations his man finds himself in. The book follows him after his captors have tortured him and thrown him off a cliff leaving him for dead but then pursuing him after his body could not be found. It's a story written in and of a bygone age, it's now 80 years since Household's unnamed protaganist set out to get an evil dictator in his rifle sights only to be caught, escape and then try to flee. That hopefully shouldn't put too many off, Robin Browne's warmly elucidated tones are always clear and fitting to the text. This is a golden, analogue recording of Geoffrey Household's 1939 thriller release of Rogue Male complete with background hiss, the sounds of pages turning and even brief stitches of silence holding the sections together that make you wonder if playback has stopped.

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household