Geoffrey Household · 1939 · survival

Geoffrey Household's 1939 thriller. An English sportsman who has hunted everything else stalks a European dictator to his mountain retreat, purely to see whether it can be done, and gets him in the crosshairs without firing. He is caught, tortured and thrown off a cliff to look like an accident - and the rest of the book is a hunted animal working its way home and then underground.

1. 1
   Poland

   On a shooting holiday in Poland the narrator conceives the idea as a sporting problem - to get within a trigger pull of the best guarded man in Europe - crosses the frontier, does it, and is taken before he can leave.

2. 2
   Aldwych

   Left for dead at the foot of a cliff, he crawls away, gets aboard a ship as a stowaway and reaches England - where the dictator's agents pick him up again in London, and he kills one of them in the tunnels by Aldwych station.

3. 3
   Wimbledon

   Now hunted by the British police as well, he orders a complete set of camping equipment from Harrods, has it delivered to him on a suburban railway platform, and disappears out of London the same afternoon.

4. 4
   Beaminster

   In the Dorset hills near Beaminster he digs himself into a hedgerow like an animal, with a chimney and a camouflaged door - and lives in the burrow for weeks until the agents find it and seal him in.