In Rogue Male, a citizen of an unnamed central European country decides to take aim at a dictator. He doesn’t shoot, but the threat is enough. He is tortured, then dragged away to the top of a cliff, a faked suicide that’s easier for the morally troubled nation to explain than an extra-judicial murder.
The short novel follows the man’s journey from the cliff. He is wanted for the assassination attempt, tracked through the country and all across Europe. But through stealth, stealing, and his most valuable weapon, his English-gentleman façade, the man safely gets out of the country and makes it all the way to Dorset – after paying a sneaky visit to his solicitor to move around some money – where he is eventually run down by a foreign agent, known under his fake identity as Major Quive-Smith.
The protagonist is a murderer. He kills one of his pursuers in London, and, before the novel is out, kills another, but he’s also reasonable, resourceful, and funny. Even as he scrunches up atop a muddy sleeping bag in a hole under a pile of branches, he is capable of biting commentary on class and the meaning of patriotism. He’s the best of James Bond, without all the lechery, and you’ll root for him if only to gain more bon mots about life amongst the ex-pats in Cairo.
Published by New York Review Books (1939)