Watcher in the Shadows

by Geoffrey Household

A deadly pursuit through the English countryside from the acclaimed author of ROGUE MALE.

After working as a double agent for the British in Nazi Germany during the war, Charles Dennim is now living a quiet, unassuming life in England. Until the postman delivers a letter bomb to his front door.

Suddenly hunted by a killer with no name and no apparent motive, Dennim must use his wartime skills to stay alive, and the two master hunters embark on a deadly game of cat and mouse through the picturesque English countryside.

With brilliant descriptions of the Cotswolds and a high-stakes manhunt, this is a pursuit novel that stands with Household's best.

Genres: Thriller, Mystery, Fiction, Adventure, Historical Fiction, Espionage, Crime

176 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

British author of mostly thrillers, though among 37 books he also published children's fiction. Household's flight-and-chase novels, which show the influence of John Buchan, were often narrated in the first person by a gentleman-adventurer. Among his best-know works is' Rogue Male' (1939), a suggestive story of a hunter who becomes the hunted, in 1941 filmed by Fritz Lang as 'Man Hunt'. Household's fast-paced story foreshadowed such international bestsellers as Richard Condon's thriller 'The Manchurian Candidate' (1959), Frederick Forsyth's 'The Day of the Jackal' (1971), and Ken Follett's 'Eye of the Needle' (1978) .

In 1922 Household received his B.A. in English from Magdalen College, Oxford, and between 1922 and 1935 worked in commerce abroad, moving to the US in 1929. During World War II, Household served in the Intelligence Corps in Romania and the Middle East. After the War he lived the life of a country gentleman and wrote. In his later years, he lived in Charlton, near Banbury, Oxfordshire, and died in Wardington.

Household also published an autobiography, 'Against the Wind' (1958), and several collections of short stories, which he himself considered his best work.

Reviews

[Cliff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing novel. Who needs James Patterson, Harlen Corben or the rest of those modern thriller writers. Here is the template: the quintessential psychological, existential thriller, where good isn't always good and bad isn't necessarily bad. Read this - and Rogue Male, Household's classic 'hunter-and-the-hunted' book. Writing from the top drawer.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Dennim hasn't got an enemy in the world. So why would someone send him a bomb in the mail? Because he is also Baron Karol von Dennim, and he once worked at Buchenwald as a Gestapo. He was actually working undercover as a British agent, but whoever is trying to kill him apparently hasn't heard that part, so Charles had better come up with a plan fast if he wants to survive.

Dennim uses the metaphor of tethering a goat to catch a tiger, and he is using himself as the bait. But he has a few tricks leftover from his wartime service, and he just might become the tiger himself.

I really enjoyed this one. I could imagine it as a very tense movie, but the book was good too. Very frustrating as I was just 40 pages from the end and things were really intense when I just kept getting interrupted again and again! I finally managed to get rid of all the distractions and finish the last few pages. Very good.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another thoroughly satisfying manhunt novel from Household. There are a number of similarities here to Rogue Male, but also many significant differences. The protagonist is not quite so isolated or defenseless, and yet the stakes are just as high.

This time, the metaphor at the heart of the novel is that of "blind chess":

. . . the German Intelligence chess, in which a player never sees his opponent's men at all. He is told by a referee when a move is impossible and when he has taken or lost a piece. From that he must construct his own picture of the squares which are occupied and the pattern occupying them.

Throughout the book, the competence and minimalist quality of Household's prose remains impressive. And the finale is a genuine, sustained (over nearly 50 pages) nail-biter. This author's novels are enough to single-handedly revive your hopes for an over-worked genre.

[T.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Household's thrilling man hunts man sagas (the other is Rogue Male). Descriptions of the English countryside are wonderful. And the final battle--at dusk on horseback--between the two gentlemen is quite rousing.

[Sam Gilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent adventure story combining that peculiarly British love of countryside, a backdrop of medieval values, and a thrilling and unconventional duel. This is in many ways a spy story set in the fields and escarpments of the Cotswolds, with a spare but finely etched collection of characters.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Household writes in the style and tone of John Buchan. Their heroes are gentlemen, ex-officers with war and espionage experience, now retired, with time on their hands. They have careers (Charles Dennim in this novel is a zoologist studying squirrels), or maybe just hobbies, but they don't ever seem to have bosses. When the lure of being either an assassin or a quarry looms, they drop everything to eagerly take part.

The problem is that this style and tone is very antique for the book's setting of 1955. Dennim lives in suburban London with his Aunt Georgi, whose "conversation, like that of many intelligent women, only made sense retrospectively. I mean that it appeared incoherent until it arrived at its destination - when all the rest, if you could remember it, fell into place and was relevant." England is his adopted country; he's really an Austrian Count - the Graf von Dennim. During World War II he served the British undercover in the Gestapo at Buchenwald, and turned down the George Cross, feeling his actions would dishonor it. Now, someone unhappy with his Buchenwald role is trying to kill him - a parcel explodes at his front door, killing the postman.

Dennim's solution is not to turn over the matter to the police, and obtain a bodyguard, but to become bait, to become the goat tied to a stake that lures the tiger. The tiger metaphor is exhaustively, tediously paraded. He borrows a cottage in Buckinghamshire where he can pretend to observe badger setts. The assassin follows. Dennim befriends an assortment of countryfolk and survives some poisoned veal cutlets. He moves to the Cotswolds, borrows an Arabian stallion, develops a crush on a vicar's daughter 20 years younger, and meets his assassin. They sit down for a whiskey at an inn and come to an agreement over how the next part of the battle will be fought, as if this were an 18th century duel.

You're right, this doesn't make a lot of sense.

Then they retreat, each with his horse and revolver, to their respective hideouts a few hundred yards apart, and wait for nightfall. There follows a lot of stumbling around in a barn and a gunfight in the dark.

[Derek Collett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel starts with a bang (literally). Charles Dennim receives a letter bomb that blows up and kills the postman instead of its intended target.

Dennim, an ex-WWII cloak-and-dagger boy turned zoologist in peacetime, realizes that he is being hunted by a Frenchman who has dedicated himself to tracking down (and killing) ex-Gestapo officers who worked at Buchenwald, which is where Dennim had worked as an undercover British agent. Realizing the ruthlessness and dogged persistence of his assailant, Dennim chooses to move from London to the Buckinghamshire countryside. Here he will peg himself out like a sacrificial goat and force the other man to show his hand.

The first half of Watcher in the Shadows is excellent. Saint Sabas (the 'tiger' who is pursuing Dennim) makes a very early attempt on the zoologist's life, before he has even had a proper chance to settle in at his remote cottage. (I thought this was a nice twist: one would have expected it to take much longer for the hunter to get his first sight of the quarry.) There are some classic Household moments in this part of the book that can stand comparison with similar episodes to be found in the likes of Rogue Male and A Rough Shoot.

Unfortunately, the middle part of the book is a real letdown after what has gone before. Dennim loses his nerve after further attempts on his life by Saint Sabas and decides to leave the cottage. He spends some time staying with the vicar friend of his aunt and hence the trail goes cold for a while. All the suspense and excitement carefully built up in the opening two chapters is dissipated and the book becomes less a 'man on the run' chase story and more of a comedy of manners as Dennim is introduced to a range of colourful (and not especially believable) characters of his aunt's acquaintance. Household does spin some plot threads that will later assume importance but surely he could have spun them faster and in a more subtle way? Briefly, Dennim takes a mistress (the vicar's daughter), acquires an Arabian stallion and sets off on the horse for the Cotswolds, looking for another suitable place in which to initiate his deadly endgame.

The conclusion of the story is exciting, suspenseful and cleverly worked out. Sadly though, a lot of goodwill towards the author on the part of this reader had been lost after the story had sagged so badly in the middle and it took me a while to reawaken my interest in what was going on after such a long gap in the action-packed part of the narrative. However, the final duel between the two men in and around a barn is undeniably gripping - I was totally rapt whilst reading it (as indeed I was for most of the first two chapters).

Of the seven Household novels I have read to date, I would rank Watcher in the Shadows third or fourth. Had the middle been as good as the beginning and end then it could have been classed alongside A Rough Shoot (although still a considerable distance behind Rogue Male).

[Monique · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not finish. This one started very promisingly with a bomb but fell into a tedious trap of English manners, tea drinking and countryside. My eyes glazed. I could get past this point. Too much else waiting to be read.

[J. Trott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars for a project of limited scope. It is refreshing to see the male hero of the European tradition, where reserve is valued above passion.

[Jamie Farquharson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic blend of rustic English reminisce and gritty post-war manhunt. Smashing read.

[Richard Givan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book from the 50s with a good enough plot, but the story bogged down pretty badly in the middle.

[Patrick Baty · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good psychological thriller. Classic Geoffrey Household.

[AdiTurbo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started out great but I got lost on the way due to the slow pace and old-style writing. Doesn't work so well anymore, I think.

[Sam Reaves · Rating 3 out of 5]

Geoffrey Household wrote a wide variety of thrillers set in diverse locales, but his most characteristic works were those involving a hunter-prey contest, with a man on the run, making use of the familiar English countryside to evade pursuit. The pretexts varied; sometimes the pursuers were the police; sometimes they were sinister agents of a foreign power. The point was the chase, and Household made that particular sub-genre his own.
In this one, Charles Dennim, a naturalized British citizen of German origin who spent the Second World War under deep cover as a British agent inside the Gestapo, finds himself pursued by a veteran leader of the French resistance intent on avenging his wife, who died in Buchenwald. The widower has identified several German officers who were particularly implicated in his wife’s death (mistakenly, of course, in Dennim's case), and he is bumping them off them one by one. When a mail bomb kills a postman at Dennim’s door he realizes it’s his turn now, and he takes to the countryside in the Cotswolds to draw out his pursuer and precipitate a confrontation where collateral damage will be less likely. The stalking and the final duel between two loners carrying lots of psychic baggage from the war constitute the backbone of the story; along the way there is a slightly intrusive love interest to give Dennim something to live for. The best part is the cat-and-mouse game over field and stream, entertaining for fans of action thrillers or lovers of the English countryside.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It would be disgraceful to die just when my eyes had become English.”

This is a unique, at least in my experience, setup for a thriller. When I saw this book in the discard pile of a Chicago bookstore, missing its flap, the triton on the cover striding the waves, the title, and the opening lines invoking ancestry and “perverted common sense” I thought this was some obscure horror novel in the Lovecraft vein.

It was only when I got to the bomb that I realized it was going to be a mystery thriller. And what an odd setup—set a decade after World War II, Charles Dennim is an Austrian, living in England, who had been trained by British intelligence and worked undercover in Austria and Germany, eventually ending up working in a Nazi concentration camp trying to pass intelligence on to the Allies while at the same time saving as few lives as he could.

Now, the people who ran the concentration camp are being murdered, and the murderer is apparently after Dennim, not knowing he was an Allied agent! So Dennim must call on all the fieldcraft he learned in the war, as well as the very different fieldcraft he learned afterward taking up the very English occupation of squirrel and badger zoologist, to survive long enough to figure out who is after him and why.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second time through, after an interval of forty years, Household's book holds up. It goes on the same shelf with "Rogue Male," "Rogue Justice," and with P. M. Hubbard's "Kill Claudio": novels written from the point of view of the hunted, one being stalked by someone (at first unknown) out of his past. Granted, in all three cases, the hunted is equipped to become the hunter, and does (though the hunted in "Rogue Male" remains trapped throughout much of the book's second half). It's an interesting subset of the chase novel, and John Buchan was the king of it, though Household came close to him as a reverse chase author. Thomas Perry's Jane Whitehurst books are recent versions that have held my interest strongly.


" . . . only years of living on one's nerves can teach the difference between imagination which is out of control and the quite dependable instinct of the hunted (p. 110)."

[Dancomfort · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an old favorite; Charles Dennim, an Austrian biologist who served undercover in Nazi Germany is living quietly in England after the war. One day the postman tries to push a package through his mail box and is killed when the bomb in the package explodes. Someone is killing Nazis; and the killer doesn't know Dennim was really working for the British.

Dennim is torn; he doesn't want to die, but he has a certain sympathy for the killer. He spends the rest of the book trying to identify and stop the killer before the killer gets him.




I reread it in Feb. 2014.

[Sharon Zink · Rating 3 out of 5]

A compelling story of revenge after World War II. A relative of an inmate of Ravensbruck attempts to kill a man whom he believes was a concentration camp guard.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hunter and hunted in the English countryside, a Nazi death camp survivor chasing down his intended foe.

Working from a list of books I read years ago.

[NellyBells · Rating 3 out of 5]

maybe 3.5 but not nearly as thrilling as the Rogue books. I ave to get a new keyboard. It was really a feat of ide and seek, wonder how he plotted his novels.

[Cidney · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is set 10 yrs after the end of world war 2. Charles Dennim was working for British Intelligence in the Nazi death camps and helping women to escape. After the war he stopped working for the intelligence services and went to live with his elderly aunt in a small village looking into the habits and lifestyles of squirrels and badgers. Until one day his postman is blown to pieces at his front door whilst delivering a parcel. Charles is a worried man, who wants to blow him up? And it wasn't his postman.

He gets in touch with his old handlers who tell him he should go into hiding as his life is in danger. He goes to live in a small cottage deep in the countryside whilst his aunt takes a holiday in a vicarage somewhere else, for as she tells him she cannot live in the same house as her best male friend as that wouldn't be right!

Charles is convinced that someone is following him even in his new hideout and he is correct. There follows a series of meetings with people locally who tell him of the stranger often walking down the lane and he finds himself being hunted. He eventually gets into a showdown on a horse with the assassin outside a pub in which they agree to a duel out in the open fields. The night is getting dark and they let go of their horses and hunt around for each in the fading light. Charles is given away by his horse who comes over to find him and the assassin shoots at him. A lengthy battle begins which takes up a lot of the book and one of the men is left nearly dead. Well at that point. He doesn't make it to the ambulance.

I won't give away the ending, okay my eyes glazed over after what seemed dozens of pages of descriptions of the duel, but it was still a good book.

[Bilbo Nobwank · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh dear. I'm afraid I had to bail out on this one, halfway through.

I've enjoyed all of Geoffrey Households other thrillers that I've read so far: The Third Hour, The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac, Fellow Passenger, A Rough Shoot, Summon the Bright Water, The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown, Face to the Sun, The Courtesy of Death and, of course Rogue Male.

Some of them I liked more than others but, as I said in my review for Rogue Male, they all have a kind of "cozy rainy Sunday afternoon of my childhood" film noir feel. Not too demanding. But fast-paced enough to keep you turning those pages.

Watcher in the Shadows was a real disappointment. On the face of it, i should have had the same kind of plot as the previously read ones I've listed above. But I just couldn't get through this one at all.

It started of in similar vein to the rest: lone hunted man trying to outwit "baddies" who are out to get him. And was fine for a few chapters. But then it just meandered off into a really tedious middle section which, not to put to fine a point on it, just waffled on and on about nothing for page after page. So it really gave the feeling that the author had run out of plot and was just padding things out to achieve a contractual word count.

In the end, I lost interest so much, I just stopped reading.

[GhostofMyrtle]

Watcher in the Shadows is a novel by English author Geoffrey Household. One of many thrillers he wrote, this one concerns Charles Denim, an ex double agent working for the British in World War Two, who is now living a quite life as a naturalist in the English countryside being hunted by an unknown assassin for something he was alleged to have done in the past.

Not a bad read although I thought the sequence that covered most of the last part of the story was a bit elongated and did not hold my attention. Perhaps I do have adhd! I have read better but it's not terrible. It was made into a tv film by CBS in 1972 entitled Deadly Harvest, starring Richard Boone, Patty Duke and Michael Constantine with the action moved to California and the lead character now a freedom fighter who has defected from the Iron Curtain.

Bonus point, however, for this line:

"Denita, there is no need to carry on like an Italian whose second cousin has just died of old age".

As well as writing novels, Geoffrey Household wrote short stories and, whilst in the U.S. wrote for children's encyclopedias and children's radio plays for CBS. He has had four of his novels and one short story made into films.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Charles Dennim is forced to realize that a ruthless killer is after him. Revenge for an incident in a German extermination camp is the motive: police protection offers little comfort. Coolly, Dennim decides to plant himself out in the country -- a tethered goat to lure the tiger."
~~back cover

A little too much of the spy genre for me, and the final ending was too long and too interstate about a fight to the death for my taste. Clever premise, excellent characterization and grand descriptions of the English countryside rescue the book to 2 stars.

[Sem · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's only one problem with this book and it has a name - Benita. The moment she appeared the narrative slowed to a crawl and the author lost his skill for characterisation. I got up and made a cup of tea. I stared at the Christmas decorations. I was bored. And then she was gone (more or less) and the story raced to its close. I can't think of a more perfect example of 'how to deflate your narrative in five seconds with an unnecessary plot device'. As my father would have said, it 'dragged a bit'. I refuse to hold that against it though.

[Kathrin Passig · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ich war vor dreißig Jahren großer Fan von "Rogue Male" und dachte immer, der Autor hätte sonst nichts geschrieben. Via Twitter bin ich auf dieses Buch gestoßen. Es fängt auch ganz gut an, enthält aber fast nichts von dem, was "Rogue Male" so gut macht und dafür sehr viel Gerede über Blut und Ehre und adelige Verpflichtungen, plus eine absolut schamlose Geschichte über "ich war Gestapo-Offizier im KZ, aber *in Wirklichkeit* habe ich für den britischen Geheimdienst gearbeitet".

[Kevin Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I’ve read in a long time and I just happened upon this book. A true page turner that makes it hard to put down. The best part is that I had never heard of Geoffrey Household, so now I have a bunch of books to read! If you like thrillers with history and clever writing, I think you will like it.

[Lyon Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the third book in a row that I have read by this author. The plots all follow a similar theme of a lone hunter himself being hunted. I thought this was the weakest of the three but still enjoyed it. We are very much in John Buchan territory here. The writing in all three books is superb. I found the plot somewhat contrived, but a good read suitable for a wet Sunday afternoon.

[Jed Mayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A game of cat and mouse between a spy and a victim of the Nazis across the English countryside: the usual thrills and weirdness from the inimitable Household, whose curious fascination with rodents continues unabated.

[Paul Taylor · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am surprised that this book is so highly rated by other readers. It stretches credibility to the point of absolute absurdity. It is sad that the writer of the incomparable Rogue Male should right such a book as this.