For almost half a century Geoffrey Household turned out adventure novels characterized by old-fashioned virtues: charm and wit, an erudite appreciation of the historical and the literary, a sense of irony and humor, and a depth of feeling for nature. His style, usually communicated by a first-person narrator who is a cosmopolitan man of decency and honor, is Edwardian, Etonian-the bemused speech of a gentleman, full of classical allusions and eclectic facts and details that were the commonplace knowledge of upper-middle-class Englishmen before World War I. Although his work includes reenactments of significant historical events, picaresque novels, science-fiction satire, and nature studies, he is most famous for writing about the manhunt, usually told as a confession in which the psychology of hunter and hunted is laid bare. A sense of chivalry and sportsmanship imbues Household's hunts with an ironic counterpoint: the violence and savagery of life and death...