jay rothermel

A sequel to his 1939 novel Rogue Male, Rogue Justice (1982) was also written by Geoffrey Household. It is a brief, "relaxed" first-person thriller. Narrator Richard Ingleram, having failed a second time to get close enough to Hitler to murder him, flees east, then south. Poland, Romania, Greece, Turkey, British Palestine, and Egypt each offer him precarious cover to evade Nazi pursuers. Once he reaches Haifa, the UK mandate authorities assume he's an Oswald Mosley type British fascist. The justice Ingleram comes to seek is physical oblivion. His personal vendetta has failed, but has blown-back to dirty his own values. His only priority is not to shame his family name. Rogue Justice is a fine novel, first-rate as a thriller and a story of ethical awakening. Reversals of fortune abound. In the end, death drive becomes death wish.

The wyrdest of weird fiction. Snippets of landscape and interiors shortly after disasters have emptied them of [normal] life. Among clues left behind: signs of cultic suicides and Old Testament-scale flooding.