The police are searching for the Englishman because of the murder of the enemy agent on the Tube. With the hide set up, the Englishman, who has adopted a feral cat, believes he just has to stay out of sight until the enemy gives up. He buys a bicycle and sidecar from a holidaying family and travels to the Dorset countryside, where he builds an underground hide in a sunken lane that is overgrown and almost invisible. The Englishman gets equipment together in order to ‘go to ground’ until the search dies down. There, he kills one of his pursuers by throwing him onto an electrified rail. He’s spotted by enemy agents as he leaves the solicitor’s office, and they chase him into a London Underground station. He thinks the British state won’t protect him, and he’s reluctant to involve his friends, so he resolves to lie low until the heat is off. In London, the Englishman contacts his solicitor to arrange his affairs. The Englishman sails down river until he reaches a port, where he stows away on a British ship and makes good his escape. Although severely injured, he crawls away and hides in a tree after making it look like he fell into the river and drowned. The secret police don’t believe him but, unable to get any other information from him, they decide to fake his death by throwing him over a cliff and leaving him for dead.īy pure luck, the Englishman lands in a bog and so doesn’t die. The Englishman claims the ‘hunt’ was just a sporting challenge, and he was not really going to kill the dictator. They’ve just caught the Englishman near their leader’s villa, seemingly about to shoot. The secret police of a European country (probably Nazi Germany although possibly the Soviet Union) are torturing an unnamed upper-class English big-game hunter.

(For more on loglines, see The Killogator Logline Formula) Rogue Male: Plot Summary Somewhere in Europe The enemy catches up with him and he has to use all his hunting skills to survive. (For more on titles, see How to Choose a Title For Your Novel) Rogue Male: LoglineĪfter failing to assassinate a dictator, an upper-class English hunter is tortured and left for dead, but escapes back to England where he tries to ‘go to ground’ in the countryside. This is how the Protagonist sees himself. In nature, a rogue male is an aggressive elephant who separates from the herd and roams independently. The title is a figurative allusion to the Protagonist. To view them, just select/highlight them. Warning: Major spoilers are blacked out like this secret. Widely regarded as a classic, critics often mention it in lists of the top ten spy novels of all time, although really it’s more of a chase thriller. Rogue Male, written by Geoffrey Household and published in 1939, is one of the first assassination novels told from the point of view of the assassin.

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