he has to kill one of them in self-defence, which puts the local police on his trail. His pursuers don't stop chasing him even in London. This concludes the first part of the novel. But he survives, badly wounded as he is, and escapes to London, first on foot, then by a boat and lastly by a ship, all the while his pursuers are only a step or two behind him. Once he has fulfilled his initial objective by getting the dictator in his sights, he is immediately captured, tortured and then dropped off from a cliff in order to make his death look like an accident. He has no intention of actually pulling the trigger, he says. It's only a theoretical exercise put to practice, he says. He says (the entire novel is dictated in first person) that his objective is only to check whether it is possible to get such a closely guarded head of state in his gun-sight. As the novel begins, he is with his hunting gear in the countryside of an unnamed country, where his quarry is revealed to be an unnamed dictator (this could be either Hitler or Stalin). The protagonist of Rogue Male is unnamed, though there is considerable evidence to suggest that he is an independently wealthy member of the English upper class. I searched the subreddit if this novel had ever been mentioned, didn't find it, so I thought I should give a shout-out to this excellent though unmentioned-as-yet novel.
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