Watcher in the Shadows - Geoffrey Household

Watcher in the Shadows begins with Charles Dennim receiving a bomb in the mail. Fortunately for him, he was a little slow answering the door. Not so fortunate for the postman, who got tired of waiting and tried to force it through the slot. Dennim initially dismisses it as a mistake, but soon enough receives a note in the mail convincing him he was the intended target.

See, during World War 2, Charles worked at Buchenwald for the Gestapo, then moved to England after the war, where he settled into a quiet life studying squirrels while sharing a home with his aunt. And there is someone none too happy about that. If it seems odd that the book might be written from the perspective of someone the reader might reasonably want to see killed, I should mention that Charles was actually in the employ of British Intelligence during the war, and helped more than one resistance member escape imprisonment. Not that his killer knows that.

Which leads to an interesting circumstance where Charles is determined to confront his pursuer, and try to explain himself, in the hopes that will quell the murderous rage. He would really rather not kill someone for a perfectly honest mistake. At the same time, he would also prefer not to fall into the hands of a man who has already killed three others who served at Buchenwald (and weren't British spies), and who kept the last one dying for three days.

Even though Charles is in peril for essentially the entire book, I wouldn't call it tense. Part of that is the story is presented as Charles writing about it after the fact. But the book is very deliberate in its pace. Household made a point of making Charles a naturalist, someone accustomed to patience, careful observation, and careful planning, and that's reflected in the pace of the book. There's a lot of cat and mouse, with Charles trying draw out his hunter so he can recognize him, then trying to bait him out into ground Charles has chosen. But when things don't go as planned, he stops and tries to determine what went wrong, why he failed, and then pick up the trail again. There aren't any tense chases down narrow alleys in the dead of night. Instead there are a lot of seemingly leisurely strolls through the English countryside in broad daylight.

There's a romantic subplot added in around the two-thirds stage of the book. I can see the point Household was trying to make (that Charles, in trying to ignore his past, is trapped by it), but it still didn't feel like it fit. It either needed to be excised entirely, or expanded. As it is, it has the appearance of Household feeling he needs to have some romance angle, and just tossing that in there perfunctorily. If he'd built it up some more, I think it would have been fine; he's a pretty good writer.