Given the publication date, I assume the dictator is Hitler, though I could be wrong.
Household was quoted once as saying that he always envisioned the dictator as Hitler, but left it open in case the reader wanted it to be Stalin. [edit] It even says so on Wikipedia.
I never had a choice about seeing him as Hitler because I read the novel after seeing the first film version, Man Hunt (1941), which is a perfectly enjoyable anti-Nazi WWII thriller directed by Fritz Lang and is one hundred and ten percent not as batshit as the novel. I saw it with my mother and her reaction was essentially to go straight to the library and get the book for me. (Then the NYRB came out with its timely reprint and I got her a copy of her own.) I've never read anything else of Household's and I keep meaning to, partly because of the casual genre mix-in in Rogue Male. There are ways in which it reminds me of Dick Francis cranked up to eleven or maybe twelve.
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Date: 2020-02-10 09:34 pm (UTC)Household was quoted once as saying that he always envisioned the dictator as Hitler, but left it open in case the reader wanted it to be Stalin. [edit] It even says so on Wikipedia.
I never had a choice about seeing him as Hitler because I read the novel after seeing the first film version, Man Hunt (1941), which is a perfectly enjoyable anti-Nazi WWII thriller directed by Fritz Lang and is one hundred and ten percent not as batshit as the novel. I saw it with my mother and her reaction was essentially to go straight to the library and get the book for me. (Then the NYRB came out with its timely reprint and I got her a copy of her own.) I've never read anything else of Household's and I keep meaning to, partly because of the casual genre mix-in in Rogue Male. There are ways in which it reminds me of Dick Francis cranked up to eleven or maybe twelve.