The Spartan nature of British private boarding school upbringing enables him to withstand torture, pain, and privation and his knowledge of the outdoors and country life enables him to survive off the land. Our pretend sniper is both helped and hindered by his background.

But he survives the plunge and so begins the manhunt across Europe and into the English countryside that makes up the rest of the book. Instead they hurl him off a cliff, hoping to make his death appear accidental. His captors having tortured him to see if he was part of a genuine assassination plot, rather than off on a sporting lark as he insists, they can hardly afford either to charge him with a crime and reveal their own incompetence in letting him get so close, nor release him and have to explain their brutality towards an important British citizen.

The book begins after the unnamed hunter has been captured, his experiment a success. And in his NY Times obituary, it is revealed that part of the genesis of the book was his own hatred of Hitler and his belief that: 'the man had to be dealt with, and I began to think how much I would love to kill him.' I don't know if Geoffrey Household ever read that story, but in Rogue Male he offered up the story of a British aristocrat, an accomplished sportsman and author, who decides to see if he can stalk an Eastern European dictator and get him in his cross-hairs. Having read the hunter's book, Zaroff correctly imagines that he'll make an especially challenging target.

You probably read it in school or have seen the movie or may remember a reference to it in Zodiac, but, to refresh your memory, it concerned a famous big-game hunter who gets shipwrecked on the island of a Russian aristocrat, General Zaroff, who is obsessed with hunting to the point that he's taken to stalking humans, the 'most dangerous' prey of the title. In 1924, Collier's Weekly published a short story by Richard Connell, The Most Dangerous Game, which was destined to become one of the most anthologized tales of modern times.

Rogue male by geoffrey household