No one could ever have accused Geoffrey Household, on the surface the ultimate ‘hunting, shooting, fishing English country squire’ of being a ‘Little Englander’ for his liberal pan-Europeanism permeated his writing. His protagonists often have dual nationalities or mixed backgrounds, as in Fellow Passenger (1952), Watcher in the Shadows (1960) or The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac (1978), yet in the best of them is always a strong strain of stiff-upper-lipped English gentleman.
Nowhere more so than in Raymond Ingelram who personifies the English gentleman in Rogue Male and by the time we meet him in Rogue Justice has perfected the cool, very British (English) attitude of self-depreciation when under fire. Observing the use of the sub-machine gun (disparagingly referred to as ‘a hosepipe’), Ingelram casually remarks ‘The carefully aimed shot seemed to have become unfashionable in modern tactics’ and later, when he tries ‘a little north-west frontier stuff’ at an enemy armoured column, he observes the retaliation casually: ‘It was my first experience of a mortar – evidently a useful weapon for keeping a sniper on the move.’
For all Ingelram’s self-imposed chivalrous rules of war – at one point he declares his private war over as he has crossed into Italian-occupied territory and he has no quarrel with Italians – we are left in no doubt that this is a vendetta which can only end in death, for Ingelram’s sole aim is to avenge that ‘dark, slender lioness of love and courage’, his one true love tortured by the Gestapo (‘she had never been allowed the chance to kill herself ’), the event which had sparked his initial attempt to assassinate Hitler in Rogue Male.
The violence of the vendetta reaches the proportions of a pagan blood sacrifice and yet, when all seems lost and our hero contemplates suicide, the memory of his dead love – that ‘dark and lovely lioness’ – seems to appear to him and say, gently, ‘Not yet, not yet’. Our hero’s quest is, ultimately, nihilistic and doomed, just as it was from the start when the anonymous big-game hunter first placed Hitler in his telescopic sight.
Even though Ingelram does not expect (or want to) survive, his story is, quintessentially, a romantic one and, taken together, Rogue Male and Rogue Justice form an astonishing achievement: a multi-layered story disguised as an action thriller.
Despite the forty-year gap in writing, Rogue Justice is a superb coda to Household’s classic Rogue Male and the two books together show his writing to be in a class well beyond that of the run-of-the mill thriller.
Mike Ripley,
July 2011.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1982, 2014 by Geoffrey Household
Afterword copyright © 2011 by Mike Ripley
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
978-1-5040-1049-8
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Rogue Justice Page 20