Geoffrey Household

Geoffrey Edward West Household (30 November 1900 — 4 October 1988) was a prolific British novelist who specialised in thrillers. He is best known for his novel Rogue Male (1939).

He was born in Bristol; his father Horace was a barrister. Household was educated at Clifton College, Bristol (1914-1919) and at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he received a B.A. in English literature in 1922. He became an assistant confidential secretary for Bank of Romania, in Bucharest (1922-1926). In 1926 he went to Spain, where he worked selling bananas as a marketing manager for the United Fruit Company (Elders and Fyffes). In 1929 Household moved to the United States where he wrote for children's encyclopedias and composed children's radio plays for the Columbia Broadcasting System. From 1933 to 1939 he was a traveling salesman for John Kidd, a manufacturer of printing ink, in Europe, the Middle East and South America. He served in British Intelligence during World War II in Romania, Greece and the Middle East.

He married twice, secondly in 1942 to Ilona Zsoldos-Gutman, by whom he had a son and two daughters.

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.

He began to write in the 1920s. His first short story, "The Salvation of Pisco Gabar" was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1936. His first novel The Terror of Villadonga was published that same year. His first short story collection, The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories, came out in 1938. In all, he wrote twenty-eight novels (including four for young adults and a novella), seven short story collections and an autobiography, Against the Wind, published in 1958.

Many of his stories have scenes set in caves, and there is a science-fiction or supernatural element in some, although this is handled with restraint. The typical Household hero was a strong, capable Englishman with a high sense of honour which bound him to a certain course of action. He described himself as a writer, as "sort of a bastard by Stevenson out of Conrad ... Style is enormously important to me and I do try to develop my hero as a human being in trouble."

Indiana University holds a collection of Household's manuscripts and correspondence.