Tales of Adventurers
Thirteen stories of daring and romance from a master storyteller
Devenor has not had a good meal in five years. He dreams of Bucharest and the years between the wars, when he grew rich on Romanian oil, and fat on Romanian cooking. Of all the delicacies he packed into his ever-expanding belly, none were finer than those found in Gradina. It was the most decadent restaurant of the old regime, but under communism it has been thrown open to the workers, who profane its hallowed dining room with a ten-cent lunch of soup and bread. And so this portly oil magnate plots a trip behind the Iron Curtain to smuggle out Gradina’s cook and sate his hunger evermore.
Devenor is just one of the adventurers who star in the stories of this remarkable volume. From the islands of the Mediterranean to the peaks of the Andes, Geoffrey Household’s heroes laugh at danger—but never on an empty stomach.
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.
