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Geoffrey Household (1900-1988) | |
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British author of thrillers, who published some thirty-seven books including children's fiction. Household's flight-and-chase novels, which show the influence of John Buchan, were often narrated in the first person by a gentleman-adventurer. Among his best-know works is Rogue Male (1939), a suggestive story of a hunter who becomes the hunted. It appeared just before the outbreak of World War II, and started with a scene in which an English sportsman looks at his target, an unnamed European dictator, through the rifle sight. The book was filmed by Fritz Lang in 1941 as Man Hunt. Household's fast-paced story foreshadowed such international bestsellers as Richard Condon's thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal (1971), in which a ruthless hit man plans to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle of France, and Ken Follett's novel Eye of the Needle (1978), a story about the tracing of a German agent in the wartime England. "The ethics of revenge? The same as the ethics of war, old boy! Unless you are a conscientious objector, you cannot condemn me." (from Rogue Male) Geoffrey Household was born in Bristol as the son of Beatrice (Norton) Household and Horace W. Household, a lawyer, who became secretary of education for Gloucester. Household was educated at Clifton College, Bristol (1914-1919) and Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving his B.A. in English in 1922. Between the years 1922 and 1935, Household was engaged in commerce abroad. In Bucharest he worked for four years as an assistant confidential secretary for Bank of Romania. In 1926 Household went to Spain, where he worked as a marketing manager for Elders and Fyffes. During this period he learned to speak and write Spanish. After moving to the United States in 1929, Household wrote for children's encyclopedias and composed children's radio plays for Columbia Broadcasting System. 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. During World War II Household served in the Intelligence Corps in Romania and the Middle East. Household's wandering years gave him valuable material for his novels, which often take the reader to different parts of the world. Household started to write sporadically already in the 1920s. His first story, 'The Salvation of Pisco Gabar' was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1936. In the same year appeared his first book, The Terror of Villadonga, an adventure story for children, which described the discovery of a prehistoric sea-beast. Rogue Male marked Household's breakthrough as a thriller writer. The protagonist is a big game hunter, who is caught stalking the sinister dictator of nameless state and perhaps trying to alter the course of world history. Household do not not specifically mention German, Hitler and the Nazis, but he doesn't on the other hand leave much other alternatives. "Like most Englishmen, I am not accustomed to inquire very deeply into motives... I remember asking myself when I packed the telescopic sight what the devil I wanted it for; but I just felt that it might come in handy." The narrator-hero is tortured and thrown from a cliff, apparently to his death, but he survives miraculously and escapes to England. However, his pursues do not give up the chase. After showdown on the moors of Dorset the hero writes in his confessional diary, that one must hunt animals in their natural surroundings - and the natural surroundings of human beings is the city. "I shall not miss," he promises. Rogue Male deals with a basic moral problem: if the death of one person could save a number of lives, does it justify the killing of the person in question? Fritz Lang's movie version of the book, entitled Man Hunt, was released in 1941, some months before America's entry into the war in Europe. However, Lang did not water down its antifascist message, although Hollywood's Production Code Administration ordered the removal of some of its brutal scenes. At the end the hero (Walter Pidgeon) joins the RAF and makes an unauthorized parachute jump to Germany to finish his mission. Household used the hide and seek formula in several subsequent works, among them Dance of the Dwarfs (1968), set in the South American jungle, which also provided the milieu for the search of Utopia in The Third Hour (1937). In Rogue Justice (1982) Household returned to the paranoid, doomsday atmosphere of Rogue Male. The hero in The Watcher in the Shadows (1960), Charles Dennim, abandons his civilized life and retreats to rural England to trap his relentless killer, who wants to revenge the death of his wife. Household published also science fiction novels, supernatural fiction, and fantasy stories. THE CATS TO COME (1975) was about a future world run by felines. Besides writing thrillers and children's books Household also published an autobiography, Against the Wind (1958), and several collections of short stories, which he himself considered his best work. In one of his short pieces, 'Tell These Men to Go Away,' set in Hungary, an old English lady, Miss Titterton, keeps her principles of truth, courage and good manners in the middle of the war. With all the stiff dignity of a governess, who has taught two generations of spoilt children, she defies the German Army and refuses to give her furniture to SS. Finally she is thrown into jail, receiving no special privileges beyond permission to decorate her cell with curtains and chintz covers and to invite selected prisoners to coffee."Miss Titterton felt that it was very forgiving of the Family to rescue her and fly her back to London immediately after the war. When they explained to her that prison had been the only way of preserving her from a quite certain concentration camp and the very possible attentions of the Gestapo, she tried hard to believe them. But in her experience, she said, justice was always done. She was afraid it stood reason that she had deserved her sentence - perhaps for not taking enough care with the unruly member, my dear. It was very kind of them all to accept her disgrace so light-heartedly." (from The Europe That Was, 1979) After the war Household spent his time writing and as a country gentleman, first in Dorset, and later in Buckinghamshire. Household died on October 4, 1988. His last novel, Face to the Sun, appeared in the year of his death. Household was married twice, from 1942 to the former Ilona M.J. Zsoldos-Gutmàn; they had one son and two daughters. For further reading: World Authors 1900-1950, vol. 2, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); St James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, ed. by Jay P. Pederson (1996); 'The Lives and Times of Geoffey Household' by Michael Barber, in Books and Bookmen (Jan. 1974) Selected works:
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