Episode 77: Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

Sarah Harrison: Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …

Sarah Harrison: … but not a toxin …

Carolyn Daughters: And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

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Before we jump in to our exciting episode, we have an even more exciting sponsor. It’s Carolyn Daughters. Carolyn provides C-level communications strategy and guidance to businesses small and large. She also runs game-changing corporate brand therapy workshops and leads onsite persuasive writing workshops. She empowers startups, small businesses, enterprise organizations, and government agencies to win hearts, minds, deals and dollars. You can learn more at carolyndaughters.com.

Sarah Harrison  01:38
Carolyn, I’m so excited about our episodes right now. I know it’s incredible, yes, but before we jump into them and our super special guest, I’m also excited about our listener of the episode. I will call her also our inaugural Patreon subscriber.

Carolyn Daughters  02:00
It’s Tara McQuade from Los Angeles, California.

Sarah Harrison  02:06
You may have noticed we recently started our Patreon, and of course, she was the first one to jump on there and has already received her envelope of gratitude — every piece of swag that we have that we can send her in the mail. Thank you so much, Tara.

Carolyn Daughters  02:23
When you support Tea Tonic and Toxin, you get fun things in the mail, not bills or ads and other weird things. For me, it’s three times a year I get something fun in the mail. Unless it’s a package or something from Amazon.

Sarah Harrison  02:40
I do try and make it fancy. I have a little wax seal. I draw a picture on it.

Carolyn Daughters  02:44
Sarah is very fancy. She is in charge of sending out the swag.

Sarah Harrison  02:52
Our book this month is a good one.

Carolyn Daughters  02:58
Our book this month is Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time. It was unexpected, and I found it actually warrants rereading. Not every book does that, so kudos Geoffrey Household. Let me give you a summary. It’s the 1930s a professional hunter is passing through an unnamed Central European country in the thrall of a vicious dictator. The hunter wonders whether he can penetrate undetected into the dictator’s private compound. He does. He has the potential target in his sights, and is wondering whether to pull the trigger when he is caught in prison, torture, doomed to a painful death, the hunter makes an extraordinary and harrowing escape, fleeing through enemy territory to the safety of his native England. But that safety is delusive. His pursuers will not be diverted from their revenge by national borders and the British government cannot protect him without seeming to endorse his deed, the hunter must free society and the narrator, the protagonist, the hunter goes literally underground, like a fox to its Earth. The Hunter has become the hunted. Published in May 1939, Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household is a classic thriller and a triumph of suspense, described by Household as a bastard offspring of Stevenson and Joseph Conrad. Rogue Male is no less remarkable as an exploration of the lure of violence, the psychology of survivalism and The Call of the Wild. The New York Times praised Geoffrey Household for developing suspense into an art form. The Times UK called it, “simply the best escape and pursuit story yet written.”

Sarah Harrison  04:42
This escape narrator is incredible. We’re going to talk about that, and I have the honor to introduce our guest. I’m so excited about our guest. We have today, David Morrell, an Edgar Award and Anthony Award finalist, a Nero and Macavity winner and recipient of a. prestigious career achievement, the Thriller Master Award from the International Thriller Writers. He has written more than 30 works of fiction, which have been translated into 30 languages. He is a former literature professor at the University of Iowa and received his PhD from Pennsylvania State University. Welcome, David.

David Morrell  05:24
Well, thank you. All you had to do is tell me that you wanted to talk about Geoffrey Household, and I was on board.

Sarah Harrison  05:34
I want to tell a story that is embarrassing for myself. Oh, I can’t wait for that. I got in contact with David.

Carolyn Daughters  05:48
We want to hear that. And just as a heads up for everyone, we’re going to have a second episode with David Morrell focused on his novel. Maybe you’ve heard of it, I don’t know. It’s called First Blood.

Sarah Harrison  06:01
Yeah, it’s a little known novel.

Carolyn Daughters  06:04
It’s very small, and most people haven’t heard of it, but we’re putting a spotlight on it.

Sarah Harrison  06:10
David, if there was a passage of Rogue Male that he wanted to read, and he’s like, actually, I won’t read it. I will say what I have memorized. So let’s hear it.

David Morrell  06:21
Yes, it’s my little pirate trick. I just admire the book so much. This is the start of Rogue Male. I cannot blame them. After all, one does not need a telescopic sight to shoot boar or bear. Therefore, when they came upon me watching the lodge at a range of 550 yards. It was natural enough for them to jump to conclusions. It was a difficult problem for angry men to solve in one afternoon.

Sarah Harrison  06:54
That’s awesome. It’s a great opening, too.

David Morrell  07:00
It’s not only one of the great openings — the first four pages are astonishing as you described it. The backstory of the description of this novel takes a while. You have to explain how Rogue Male gets going, but the fact is, he set out to kill Hitler. Hitler is not named, but clearly it is Hitler. The book was published in 1939 just as all the prelude to Second World War is occurring, and this man sets out to stalk him. He’s a professional hunter, and he sets out to stalk Hitler, which was an extraordinary idea in 1939. These days, we’ve become a little inured to this concept of assassination, but at the time it would have been electrifying.

Carolyn Daughters  07:57
The narrator is caught on the first page.

David Morrell  08:03
We would be led to believe that he would that we were going to have like 50 pages of him preparing. And he says that we learn in various forms that he that he did it. He went to Poland, and then on foot. And he doesn’t name the country, but clearly it’s Germany or Austria, and so we’re expecting a lot of, and then I got there, and then I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this, but they catch him on the first or the second page, and by the fourth page, the plot is in motion, because It’s not about him trying to assassinate Hitler. It’s about his escape. They torture him. And he says in one of those electrifying moments that his left eye is starting to work again.

Carolyn Daughters  08:56
And his nails are growing back. So that’s good. And it just says it offhandedly that I want to perhaps later, we can talk about Hemingway and understatement and the effect of understatement. In any case, he has escaped. In one of the great themes for Rogue Male, they throw him off a cliff after they’ve tortured him, because the idea is that you have to explain all the mutilation. And as it happens, he lands in mud, and which is the start of a persistent theme throughout the entire novel, of him being encased in mud or trapped in closed spaces. And the mud is. What they say is, I’m bleeding to death. And from there, the novel is this gate and the hunt for him. I don’t know many books that set up that quickly, that complicated a scenario, and I mean, it’s just it’s a miraculous book from a point of view of a professional author. It’s magical how he manages to do all of these narrative combine all these narrative elements and then get the book just moving forward in a really terrific pace.

Sarah Harrison  10:16
It definitely stands out in terms of style and approach is a real turning point for those of our listeners that are new to our podcast. We’ve started back with Edgar Allan Poe, and we have been walking through the history of mystery. So whenever we get to one of these turning points, like a book like this, it really stands out in terms of the progression of the genre. David, I want to talk to our listeners a little bit about how I found you, which was slightly embarrassing for myself. But for some reason, I’m going to tell embarrassing stories about myself.

Carolyn Daughters  10:58
I’m also drawn to that.

Sarah Harrison  11:02
Well, so Carolyn’s a wonderful podcast partner, and so we go through, independently, and look up our upcoming books. We look up who we want to have on guests, experts. And I noticed we didn’t have a Geoffrey Household expert. So I started Googling, and I found this essay that you wrote. It was an essay on Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, and it had been a part of thrillers, 100 must reads, which you had co-edited, which was nominated for an Edgar Award. So I’m poking around, I’m reading this essay, and I’m like, This guy’s great. He really likes Geoffrey Household. Maybe he’d be interested in being on a podcast. And I’m looking on the website, and I’m looking at the tabs across the top, and I’m like, why is Rambo there? Like many folks, I was uneducated to the fact that Rambo was a book first. I grew up watching the movie.

David Morrell  12:21
We’re going to talk about this later, but in 1972 and the movie came out, 1982 and First Blood [the basis of the film Rambo] has said it’s never been out of print, this is its 52nd year. It’s never been out of print, which is something to say for a book that old. And as you said, it’s been published in 30 languages and is still being published. It was published in Hindi recently. And Brazil just licensed it again in translation for Portuguese, and it’s just amazing. I’m in this AWS truck that look. Hemingway said the talent, determination and luck are the factors and I think determination, if you keep going at it long enough, and you determine enough, you can, you can get something that makes sense as a story, but ultimately, you need the luck and certainly I had the luck with First Blood, that it was published at exactly the right time. And it’s very rare. Well, we’ll go on later, but it’s very rare that the book would have that longevity. Maybe this would be a time to segue into my relationship with Geoffrey Household.

Sarah Harrison  13:43
Exactly. My next question. You alluded to your relationship in our email exchange, and I wanted our listeners to hear more about how you met him and how you got to know him.

David Morrell  13:54
Well, I didn’t meet him, but, but this is, this is, we did have a correspondence, but this, again, this is one of those luck things. If somebody hadn’t said something to me, then this wouldn’t have happened, and this wouldn’t have happened. And anyhow, I have a doctorate in American literature, and I was a full professor at the University of Iowa, not in the writers workshop, but in the literature department. My specialty American novel. And I was at Penn State, studying with a Hemingway scholar named Philip young. And I was also studying I really, really wanted to be an author, as much as I wanted to be somebody who knew his way around books, and I had might be worth another program, another time, a television show called route 66 which was which was filmed entirely on location across the United States from 60 to 64 and was about two young men in a Corvette convertible in search of America. It was very Jack Kerouac like. And I was just the right age when it premiered to be influenced by it as as you know, it talked to me. So the head writer for that show was a man named Sterling silicon who eventually went on to receive an Oscar for adapting John ball’s novel in the heat of the night with Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier, Norman Jewison, director, and so I’m, I’m caught there and stayed. I’m, I’m getting my degrees, but at the same time, I really want to write, and I’m bad at it. I’m terrible well, because I’m trapped in academia. And I don’t mean that that way. I love academia, but not so sure it’s good for people to write fiction, right? And I had met a man named Philip Klass with a cave and Philip Klass was a professional writer whose pen name is William Tenn, I’ll call him Philip. He had been a professional writer in science fiction in the 50s and the early 60s, and he decided that it was time to have a steady job and get health benefits and all that stuff. And he signed on it and stated, I joked that Penn stated this revolutionary idea that for teaching writing, they would hire a professional writer. And anyhow, I went to him, and I said I really wanted to be a writer. And he said, Fine, get in in my course. And I’ll, we’ll work and ice, and I can be a little pushy. What I had in mind was, maybe you teach me in private. I don’t have the time to. I’m doing this other stuff for the doctorate, and I just bothered him enough that he said, All right, if you write a story a week for me, I’ll see if maybe I want to work with you. It’s an impossible task. I’m getting up. I’m all these courses, and I’m writing these short stories. And anyhow, he came to me. He sent me a sub, submitted me to his office, and he said, You have to stop. These are terrible. Well, I was writing Faulkner, writing bad versions of the books that I was studying. Henry James. I mean, it was so wrong. And he said to me, and writers who are listening to this might find it useful. He said, everyone has a dominant emotion, and often that dominant emotion is not something we want to admit. We hide it from it. He said, this is his metaphor. God, he was smart. Philip Klass. William Tenn said, it’s like a ferret that’s darning around inside you and it does not want to be caught. You do not want to know the truth about yourself. If you keep looking, you might find the subject that you are meant to write about. And he said to me that he thought my dominant emotion was fear.

Carolyn Daughters  18:39
Interesting.

David Morrell  18:41
And we could go on about why that is the case, because I have a very traumatic childhood, and so I started to write stories about fear. And in one case, I came up the story was called the plinker, which is for firearms enthusiasts, that’s somebody who target shoots. And this person is in the woods where target shooting and discovers that he has become the target of someone else. And now this is in 1967 68 and this was what I just gave you. Is a tired, tired theme these days, but it was very fresh at that time. And I wrote the novel in which it’s about this, this man, you suddenly become the object if somebody wants to kill him, and it’s in the fort, and there’s a lot of running around and this, this person who’s never hurt anyone, who’s just interested in target shooting, for the science of it is, is now in a deadly circumstance. So I gave the story to him, and. And he said, you’ve been reading Geoffrey Household. And I said, Who are you talking about? And he gave me the first book he gave me was watch her in the shadows. Eventually, maybe we’ll talk about some of the other great books Household wrote. The Watcher in the shadows is another work of genius in The New York Times said that Household raised the thriller to artistry, and then I went to the library to find more, and I found Rogue Male, and now I knew I was at home, so I’m chattering on here. I would not be a writer today if Philip Klass, William Tenn, hadn’t said to me, you’ve been reading Geoffrey Household, which I had not being a literature student. I read everything I could get my hands on with Household and then learned about him and read his autobiography. And became pretty thorough about my knowledge. To this day, there are moments in the novels I’m writing where I say, Okay, here we go into Geoffrey Household territory.

Carolyn Daughters  21:23
When I started reading Rogue Male, I read it in three parts, and it’s broken into three parts. An old, an older version of it is actually marking them by chapter. The newer version I have now is doing a demarcation with a lot of letting or space to say we’re moving into another section. So they’re, they’re, they’re demarcated in different ways. But I read it in thirds, and I read it rapidly, but over, let’s say, a few days. And every morning my husband and I take a walk, and we go a couple miles and just get some air and get the day started. And so I was telling him about this story. And so after I read the first third of Rogue Male, this is what, generally speaking, how I would sum up what I said to him, there’s this really wealthy British man, not quite 40, and he is bored and maybe has too much money and time on his hands and decides he wants to go real big game. He’s going to try to take out this European dictator. And I’m, along these lines, not disdainful of the narrator, but just presenting him as sort of flighty, sort of a dilettante. And then imagine, I get to the second part of Rogue Male, and he’s complicated in different ways. And by the third part of the book, I understand completely different things about this narrator. And so it’s like, I’m, I’m telling him on our walk that day about a completely different book. That’s what I found. So eye opening about Rogue Male is he’s figuring out that the narrator, the protagonist, this hunter, is figuring out who he is. The reader is figuring it out along with him. And it not only comes as a surprise, but I’m still weeks after I finished that book, still thinking about that book.

David Morrell  23:25
And it did the three parts. And it should be, I’m a little suspicious about these other additions three parts. The three parts are, he’s escaping, and continuously, I mean, he’s all messed up, he’s bleeding, he’s got, I mean, he can hardly walk, he can hardly see out of one eye. Then he manages, cleverly to get out of Europe, back to England. And then, in part two, we see where he has gone back, and we find out later why, subconsciously, he chose this particular area in England, and it turns out that, and I think this is what where you are going, that it turns out that he had a fiancé, and that she was committed to social causes and went back to Europe to work against what was happening there and was killed, but we don’t find this out until part three, because Rogue Male gets narrower, and as it gets narrower, he faces up to what’s inside him and his grief and his anger, which he’s been repressing. So part one is a big canvas where he gets all the way across Europe, into England. Part two is where he’s into a relatively small area, a couple miles, and even less in England, and only between hedgerows where he’s hiding. And then part three, and this is just a tour de Forest, where he’s underground, where he’s go under. Around most of the third part of the novel is in a burrow that he’s dug. And he’s basically, he’s like an animal.

Carolyn Daughters  25:06
It’s described as the size of two bathtubs, as if two bathtubs were set atop each other. So we have all of Europe shrunk down to England, shrunk to Dorset, shrunk to this two or four mile area shrunk to an area the size of two bathtubs atop each other. It’s, it’s incredible. And so it’s not as if he’s keeping things from the reader, or he’s keeping a journal along the way. It’s not as if he’s denying certain things or deliberately keeping things out, he hasn’t admitted certain things to himself. So as his realization grows, he shares it with us readers in his journal, and also those of us reading Rogue Male, which is his journal. And I just found it just eye opening, just incredible, the way he comes to terms with what he had been doing in that European country, probably Germany, and why he was doing it.

Sarah Harrison  26:15
I would say he was certainly denying. He was in denial. But it was, it was the lies he was telling himself, and he makes a really interesting admission at the end, that it’s easy to get someone to confess the lies they’ve told themselves. It’s harder to get them to tell the truth.

David Morrell  26:33
I teach writing. I was a literature professor, but I do teach writing at conferences. One thing that bothers me is the misuse of the first person. How do we account for the narrative that we’re reading if it’s the first person? If it takes me six months to a year and I’ve been working on one book for years now. I mean, how do we account for the narrator sitting down to tell the story, what is, what is the motive here? And then, most first persons, they’re just, there’s no reason for it. It’s the first person. And apparently the author felt that it was convenient to write and natural feeling to write in the first person, but, but there has to be a reason for the narrative and there has to be a reason for it to be one of the Frank Sinatra used to have a sign outside his door in Palm Springs That said, you better have a damn good reason. For the doorbell, for the gate. And I turn that around and say, You better have a damn good reason for using the first person. It is tricky, the most difficult, the most sophisticated narrative viewpoint there is. And Household’s Rogue Male is, exactly, is? It is a fabulous example of how to do it. It is the first person. And we find out that he has been writing this journal in his in his hiding place in England, because some he killed somebody. And one of those, again, in closed spaces, is subway tunnel and he wants, he wants to make certain that the wrong person doesn’t get blamed. And also he wants to explain that he really wasn’t trying to kill that guy, that dictator. He just was seeing if it was possible. That weasley kind of way, as he hasn’t really faced up that yes he was going to pull the trigger. And so the early parts of the book are a legal document, as it were, a testimony that he plans to send, if he survives to his attorney, who is a character earlier in the book, but when we get into the third part of the first person, we’re now in his realization state where he has where he has nothing else to do except confront His personal demons in these, this, these, this, it’s like a coffin, almost, that he is, that he is forced to stay in and then finally, in the last page we were in that how do we account for the document? Well, I think we have to assume this into the first person, he escapes that he that he mailed the document to the attorney whom he had spoken to at the beginning of the book, because he wants to make sure that the government, because this was the whole one of the points is that they were chasing the enemy was chasing him because they wanted. Him to sign a document saying that he was working for the government. Well, he wasn’t going to do that, but, and so one of the reasons he sent the document to his attorney, his solicitor, is that no one else is going to be responsible. Whatever he’s going to do, it’s on him. But in the passage of this and the fact that we have the document, we realize that what we’ve been reading is a form of psychoanalysis, although he would sure said that. And I mean, it is so sophisticated and yet looks so simple. I reread Rogue Male for our conversation. This escape narrative is just as good every time.

Carolyn Daughters  30:49
Several things, because you got me thinking about a number of things. So the 18th century novel often was in journal or diary form, right? A lot of the books written back then. And so one reason for that is because we wanted, because writers and readers were expecting something truthful. And so interestingly enough, what we get in Rogue Male is the revelations as they happen to the first person narrator are revealed as they’re happening, and so the reader is getting them at the same time. It’s not delayed. I’m not feeling for the most part. I’m not feeling like this narrator is unreliable, though we can argue all first person narrators are but one, one thing that happens in in 20th and 21st century literature, and I’ve also taught literature at a couple different universities, is the problem of omniscience, right? There are different levels of omniscience and different abilities to dip in and out of heads and all the way to extremes, such as the character has died, and now the character is looking down from heaven and telling their story, kind of thing. And so it’s this first person seems so almost transparent, the way Geoffrey Household does it, particularly because at no point does He say, hey, readers, I kept this from you. I probably should have admitted I was in love with this woman and went there to go kill this guy. No, he’s figuring it out. He’s a real standup guy. I’ve already said that I adore Rogue Male. I really do, and I didn’t know what to expect going in, but I really, I really do.

David Morrell  32:43
I mentioned Hemingway earlier, because Hemingway I went to Penn State from I was born and raised in Canada. When I went to Penn State, the study with a Hemingway scholar I mentioned earlier, named Philip young. And Hemingway was about grace under pressure, at least in his early work and he famous, understated Hemingway style, which was a way of repressing emotion, his characters are severely wounded, and he uses this very locked down, simple style as an example of how the characters are repressing themselves, unwilling. It’s as if they all had PTSD, but they didn’t want to admit it, and they just squeezed it into a shrill eight raisin inside them. And I had the feeling as I was reading this book, Rogue Male. Now, I have known, I do not think that Household was the kind of author or person who would have read Hemingway and enjoyed him, so I’m not suggesting, oh, really, he was a very well, we can talk. We’ll talk later about his reaction to my normal first blood, which was not a good one. I had the feeling. I mean, we can use the cliche of the British stiff upper lip, and, I mean, it’s a convenient way to cram together a lot of different attitudes about the stoic quality of a certain kind of British aristocrat. But I think that one way to look at this with the understated first person, and that’s, there’s an act of violence at the end, which is, which is so understated that you say, oh my god.

Carolyn Daughters  34:42
Did this just happen?

David Morrell  34:45
Exactly. I’ve read the paragraph, and I knew it was coming, but it his. I mean, if we untangle all this, he was in love with the woman. He was going to be married to her, and they were three spirits. They. Care about whether the announcement would be in the times and all this. And she goes off because she’s committed to social causes, and she’s killed, and it’s as if he’s been destroyed. And what has he done? He’s compacted his emotions, he’s compacted his grief, and he’s just said, Well, I’ll just get on with life and I think that Rogue Male gradually shows him opening up that grief and that anger in the style it never fully, fully expands. But I’m pretty sure this is the British version of Hemingway’s grace under pressure, that first person you know, as we get into the harrowing third part, which you were mentioning Edgar Allan Poe. There’s a lot of po feeling in the classes that just have the feeling that we’re seeing the first person expand enough for him to admit what he’s truly feeling, what is, what his true intentions are. And I mean, we go back, we use this superlative. It’s such a great use of the first person. And as you know, the whole idea of the first person is inherently, can we trust this person? I’m reminded of The Great Gatsby with Scott Fitzgerald, beginning with Nick Carraway, telling us that we can trust him, even though this book is in the first place, all first pages that I I’m trustworthy, believe me, you can. You can everything that book is.

Carolyn Daughters  36:45
That book hinges on the fact that we trust him because that’s how we come to feel for Gatsby by the end, for sure.

Sarah Harrison  36:56
You brought up the themes in Rogue Male. Oh, I said you brought a lot of themes in the book, and I was impressed. Well, a few things. One, that at the time you were introduced to Geoffrey Household, it was almost like he was a popular novelist, and you didn’t read that necessarily in academia. But now he’s pretty relegated to an obscure classic in in the genre. So that’s very interesting, but it makes a lot of sense as I’m reading it’s the beautiful, introspective prose that we don’t see everywhere. I wrote down a couple of quotes that I think relate to what you were bringing up. He says, that is to say, that is, I say, is what I thought I felt. He who has learned not to intrude his emotions upon his fellows has also learned not to intrude them upon himself. And there’s a lot there that’s this self-realization, and as you mentioned, coupled with this Englishness, as he’s always referring to the English fellow, and what he’s like and the stiff upper lip. And it was very interesting to me that the opening, the wedge that opened him up into this introspection was the interrogation of his enemy, this other Quive-Smith character, who was a superlative Hunter, who was hunting him, who was trying to get him to sign this unclear confession that he was trying to he was trying to convince them that this was a true confession and the Rogue Male was feeling was a false confession, and in arguing that he thereby outed himself to himself and began to realize what was actually true about himself. So I wondered if you could speak to that of him and his relationship with Quive-Smith and how this other Hunter got him to confess his feelings to his own self?

David Morrell  39:06
Well, it’s almost like a form of psychoanalysis or not self. It’s almost like he’s talking to a psychiatrist, and we have to remember Household had a fascinating life. He was Oxford educated, and he was trained to be a banker. And he said one day that he just did realize that this was not for him. And he said he stuck his umbrella in the, in the in the iron bars of a railing, and went off to Madrid. And eventually he stole what is he sold bananas in Spain and in South America someplace. He was in the United States for a bit, and in the Second World War, he was a military intelligence operator and operative, and he was. In many, many countries in Europe during the war. And so what we have in the scene where, and remember, he’s, he’s in the burrow, and he can’t get out of it. They sealed it up. He’s got an air hole that, and it’s getting rather noxious the fumes in there because he’s been in it so long, and the fellow on the other side, it’s almost, in its way, like confessional. If this were like in a Catholic novel, the priest on one side and the parish, the confessor, and not seeing each other. And it’s the fellow on the other side, and that’s not his real name, Quive-Smith, he’s doing the kind of mental games that an agent would do in trying to recruit somebody to his cause and make him do things for the cause. And so the men isn’t, it seems like a conversation, but it’s really an interrogation. It’s a persuasive conversation. And our main character is never name has this, you know? He says, I just went along, but really I was trying to get information from him, but we discover after each conversation, he admits that he said a little bit more than he meant to, and that Quive-Smith has in fact been able to extricate from him certain admissions which are now growing inside the narrator, And he’s now beginning to understand a lot more about himself than he had before. So it’s really a brilliant, I mean, so much of the book we’re going to be tedious talking about how well done this book is, and it’s at a time when we need dialogue. There’s no dialogue in this movie, in Rogue Male. Most of the time he summarizes the conversations he has with people, but in this case, we have a lengthy 1,020, pages of conversation and welcome. But it’s also a classic case of how one agent would try to get information, or at least be persuasive to another agent.

Carolyn Daughters  42:25
We should talk about Asmodeus. First of all, I want to ask both of you I’ve not seen there’s a BBC TV movie made of Rogue Male. And I meant to watch it, and I unfortunately did not. I will watch it, though. But I had trouble picturing Asmodeus. It’s described in the book, and then by various people writing about the book as a tomcat. Oh, it’s a cat. Somebody called it a polecat. And so I’m picturing, in the United States, a cat, like somebody who rules as he marches up and down a lane. But I’m thinking, is this really a polecat? David, what is your understanding of Asmodeus and the role he’s playing in Rogue Male?

David Morrell  43:41
He doesn’t call it a polecat, but, in fact, I called it a polecat in my essay.

Sarah Harrison  43:48
You called it a polecat?

David Morrell  43:51
It’s not a polecat. It’s a cat. So what do you don’t know anything. There’s a famous picture of Geoffrey Household that was taken for one of his books in which he has a polecat on his shoulder. So I don’t know if he had a had an In fact, if I were hard pressed, I don’t know what a polecat would be, relative to maybe a version of a bobcat that we have in the United States, I have no idea. It’s a pretty damn cat, is what it is, and it’s, and it’s, and it’s feral, and it the fact that the animal is first suspicious of him, and then gradually gets to, actually come up to him and be in the in the borough with him, you know, is a further indication of a trend that it’s amazing to me how much the main character becomes one with his surroundings. We mentioned the blood at the start, there’s a scene later where he’s hiding in a Cabbage Patch, and he has to lie there all day long, and becomes one with after he escaping in Europe, he pretends to be escaping along a stream, and they’re going to be looking for him as where he comes out, where his steps come out, and what he’s done instead, climb the tree, and he’s up the tree and he talks about the tree. It’s almost as if the branches are embracing him, as if he’s becoming one with the tree. The action scene in the in the subway tunnel and the darkness that he melts within the ditches that he crawls through. And you know at the end water is starting to fill up in his burrow. They’ve dammed up the exit so that when it rains and what have you, the water is filling. So it’s almost like in that way he could conceivably drawn, but he’s in mud along and a sense of this is what, what, apart from the brilliant narrative, the fact that he can tell a story so well, this theme of oneness with nature, the hunter, hunted theme and the mystical identification, which in the United States, some Native American tribes have talked about in traditional in traditional narratives that they published about the nature of the hunted Hunter relationship, and the way instinct can be more powerful than any rational thought. And if Household were a scientist, he probably would have been. And which I have done is written emphasizing the limbic brain. That there are three, three sets of brains we have, and the limbic brain is the most primordial. It’s the one. It’s the fight or flight brain. It’s where this doesn’t feel right. I’m getting the hell out of here, brain. And I did a novel, in fact, called The Totem, in which limbic brains became infected and caused human beings to revert to become animals, even though they were in human form. It’s a horror novel. But this this theme. I said in my essay that it’s almost as I didn’t say it this way, but it’s almost as if he’s channeling Wordsworth novelist. This would be the book.

Carolyn Daughters  47:38
I’ve never heard that sentence before in my life. But now I want to use it.

Sarah Harrison  47:46
Channeling Wordsworth through Robinson Crusoe.

David Morrell  47:50
Through Robinson Crusoe, that’s true. We’ve got so much to say. I wanted to, because people are interested in this. You mentioned thrillers, 100 must read, which is Hank Wagner. And the idea was that there’s so many great literary thrillers which are also exciting. And so Hank and I consulted with many, many first great thriller writers such as Lee Child and Sandra Brown and Tess Garritsen, and they picked their favorite thriller and wrote for free for this book, because it was a fundraiser for International Thriller Writers. They wrote 1,000 words about their favorite thriller and, and if you read them in sequence, if you go with Rogue Male, which is 1939 and you go back to Richard Connell’s famous short story, the most dangerous game, which was published in 1924 and, and that’s, again, the British big game hunter theme. And this is the case, and I hadn’t read the story when Philip Klass said, Oh, you’ve been reading Geoffrey Household. Because if I had, that story I was writing about the man who is a target shooter, who becomes the live prey for somebody who’s stalking him. And so the most dangerous game, which is about a British Big Game Hunter has got an island where shipwreck victims he hunts. Before that. John Buchan, if you’ve not, if you don’t know it the most dangerous game. This is within thriller. This is arguably the most famous short story in thriller literature, Richard Connell. And then we have John Buchan with The Thirty-Nine Steps, which is before then. And then we go back to and Household wrote and entered. Production for this book, Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands, which was published in 1903 and is a yachting a high, high action thriller set in the North Sea, to do with mysterious islands and Germans who are preparing to invade England. And it’s, I’m making it sound more trite than it is. It’s extremely realistic. And what all these three stories have in common leading up to Rogue Male is, and he mentions Robinson Crusoe and Joseph Conrad. I assume he meant Heart of Darkness is this oneness with nature, either in a good or a bad way, when in Heart of Darkness, of course, the closer we get into the jungle, the more we get to the core of our human personalities and souls. But there are antecedents for Rogue Male, and I think in a way you could say, then a certain way that they all have this mystical it’s like if Van Gogh had been a thriller writer.

Carolyn Daughters  51:14
I’m gonna start using Wordsworth and Van Gogh as a thrill. Honestly, let me ask you. John Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps. We actually read that for our history of mystery podcast last year. Richard Hannay in the Thirty-Nine Steps is way more patriotic than the narrator in Rogue Male. So can you I mean there, it’s a definite influence. But for me, Rogue Male is a superior novel, because it seems almost there’s no whatever blindness is in the book is dissipated by the end. So there’s no patriotic blindness. There’s no, this cause or that cause. The cause is really human. It’s this woman that he loved. Can you talk about the differences between those two books, similarities or differences.

David Morrell  52:14
We were talking about Asmodeus. You know that the transfer over to the affection to the cat. I mean, the cat isn’t a human being, but there’s the killing of the cat causes him to think about the fiancé, and then you know all that that emotion comes out. Well, whenever you talk about The Thirty-Nine Steps, you have the problem of the two of the Hitchcock version. And for me, the version is superior to the novel. So it’s not that the novel isn’t, isn’t a fine piece of work, but it’s confusing for me. Because we’ve been talking, as we’re professors, about form and content, right? What a book is about should be mirrored by the way the story is told and with The Thirty-Nine Steps, it uses the standard tropes of the adventure, the spy, the thriller, the chase, a story, and it’s very, very well done, but it is not art. It’s not art because there is no there is no subtext, as it were. It’s difficult to talk about these things without having a couple of hours to show how it works.

Carolyn Daughters  53:38
I don’t know that it would stand up to a second reading. I wouldn’t mind reading it again, but I wouldn’t say I am aching to read that again. Where is Rogue Male if I read it again? I know I’m going to draw things from it that I didn’t draw the first time. That’s the sign of a really good book.

David Morrell  53:54
Later, we’re going to talk about my own approach. Subtext is really important to me, and I layer things. And the very the nicest compliment I get from readers is they say, I hadn’t read the book in a while, a book, whatever it might be. So I reread, and it was a different book. The reason for it is all this text had risen to the surface and, gosh, I didn’t know this. I did. I didn’t remember that, because if I’ve done the primary job right, it’s an exciting story. And so we’re carried along like adrenaline of the narrative. But underneath it, there are I embed things it’s difficult to talk about without having examples. But Rogue Male has subtext galore, and it has every I read this so many times, and as I said, for our discussion, I said, well. Can, I’ve got to reread it again. And it was like I’d never read it before. It was so it was, oh my goodness. And even though I knew, as I mentioned earlier, this one scene that is so shocking, and it’s understatement, I really before we’re done, this is the paragraph This is and then he had the nerve to tell me that my work was too bloody.

Sarah Harrison  55:28
I definitely want to talk more about that next episode.

David Morrell  55:33
As Quive-Smith withdrew the plug, they jammed up as the air hole, and he’s narrowed it, and he’s got, he’s created what he’s calling a Ballista, which is a Roman weapon. Basically, he’s used it’s brilliant in his fury, his skin, the dead cat. And he’s used the sinews to create as a part of a weapon at like a bow and arrow only, it’s not the same. And he’s got, he’s got a stake in, in a metal stake in, in the in this tomb. And so he’s pulled back the gut from the dead cat, and he’s ready as soon as the bad guy looks down the hole at him. So there was a flash of light as Quive-Smith withdrew the plug, I started, and that slight jerk of my muscle seemed to pull the thong. Immediately afterward, his head appeared. I noticed the supplies in his eyes, but by that time, I think he was dead. The spit took him square above the nose. He looked when he vanished as if someone had screwed a ring into his forehead.

Carolyn Daughters  56:51
Incredible. Yes.

David Morrell  56:56
Hemingway referred to what he called the gooseflesh detail. Gooseflesh detail, and, oh, my god, it’s so well done. For a thriller, that’s one of the few moments of violence, and, but, boy, it sure packs a wall up. And I didn’t quite answer what you were saying, because I wanted to make sure we got that passage into our conversation.

Sarah Harrison  57:29
I actually think that’s a perfect place to pause. It’s wild. We could talk about Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household forever.

Carolyn Daughters  57:36
Listeners, we have 14 more hours allotted. No, I’m just kidding.

Sarah Harrison  57:42
We do have at least one more episode where I think I want to pick up again in a couple of places in our next episode, David, back to your correspondence with Household, back to how this writing has impacted you, especially fresh blood. So anyways, listeners, please come back for our next episode with David. It’s going to be another fascinating one, I’m sure. Thank you so much, David.

Carolyn Daughters  58:06
Thank you, David.

Sarah Harrison 
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Carolyn Daughters
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Sarah Harrison
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, stay mysterious.