Capricorn and Cancer
Stories, both comic and tragic, of the extremes to which men will go to get what they want
At the height of World War II, a Spaniard fighting for Britain shoots a sergeant dead and resolves to face execution like a good soldier. On his first visit to Israel since 1919, a veteran of World War I remembers a long-ago encounter with Jewish refugees. When a gang of revolutionaries press a pistol to a general’s neck, he dies in a fit of laughter. Working in the jungles of Argentina, a mechanic is surprised to discover himself falling in love. These are the tales that Geoffrey Household likes to tell. Some are funny; some are sad. Together, they span the oceans of the world.
Including the novellas “The Salvation of Pisco Gabar” and “The Case of Valentin Lecormier,” this remarkable collection of short fiction shows that whether writing about war or love, Geoffrey Household understood what it meant to be human.
Geoffrey Household
Geoffrey Household (1900–1988) was born in England. In 1922 he earned a bachelor of arts degree in English literature from the University of Oxford. After graduation, he worked at a bank in Romania before moving to Spain in 1926 and selling bananas as a marketing manager for the United Fruit Company.
In 1929 Household moved to the United States, where he wrote children’s encyclopedia content and children’s radio plays for CBS. From 1933 to 1939, he traveled internationally as a printer’s-ink sales rep. During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer for the British army, with posts in Romania, Greece, Syria, Lebanon, and Persia. After the war, he returned to England and wrote full time until his death. He married twice, the second time in 1942 to Ilona Zsoldos-Gutmán, with whom he had three children, a son and two daughters.
Household began writing in the 1920s and sold his first story to the Atlantic Monthly in 1936. His first novel, The Terror of Villadonga, was published during the same year. His first short story collection, The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories, appeared in 1938. Altogether, Household wrote twenty-eight novels, including four for young adults; seven short story collections; and a volume of autobiography, Against the Wind (1958). Most of his novels are thrillers, and he is best known for Rogue Male (1939), which was filmed as Man Hunt in 1941 and as a TV movie under the novel’s original title in 1976.
