Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

Geoffrey Household's gripping 1939 thriller about a nameless protagonist caught aiming a rifle at a European dictator, a thinly veiled Adolf Hitler.

An unabridged reading for BBC Radio in fifteen half-hour episodes. The reader is Micheal Jayston. First broadcast in 2004.

The narrator takes it upon himself to stalk - in the manner of a big game hunt - a human prey, a man guarded by the best in the land, a man with a vested interest in keeping himself out of the sights of any assassin. With the dictator in his sights, our hero is apprehended and tortured almost to the point of death.

Left to fall from a cliff to an apparently accidentally death he cheats fate by landing in a bog. Here begins his flight to freedom. But what kind of freedom? Even back in his native England he is hunted down by the agents of the dictator - forced to become an outlaw now wanted for actual murder after he finishes off one of his foreign pursuers in the bowels of the London Underground.

In Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household has written an adventure thriller which has yet to be bettered, and which has spawned a thousand imitations, James Bond, Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne and the rest. What is it with the initials JB?

It has been filmed twice, in the US as Man Hunt, starring Walter Pidgeon and George Sanders and in Britain with Peter O'Toole and Alistair Sim.

My recordings from BBC7 at 80kbps mono mp3. Don't be fooled by the low bit-rate, because it's mono it's almost CD quality.

Also included is the haunting theme music, Facades by Philip Glass.

Have fun and please seed

Seymour



BBC Radio Reading