Crime Masterworks: Rogue Male

Geoffrey Household’s most famous novel is a period piece that exerts such a powerful grip on the contemporary reader it may well be the best crime thriller to be published in 2014. Rogue Male was reissued this summer to mark the book’s 75th anniversary. Twelve years earlier, this unrelenting story about an English aristocrat being pursued by resourceful foreign agents was published as part of the Crime Masterworks series alongside Dashiell Hammet, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jim Thompson. Its classic status was affirmed last year by the publication of a handsome Folio Society edition.