a goodbye to Marc Behm
Here's a copy of my Guardian obituary for crime writer and friend Marc Behm:
The news of the death of Marc Behm on 12th July has only just reached me. Unsurprisingly, I can’t even find a single obituary for him since in either the American or British press, and it was through the pages of a French magazine that I actually found out about his passing. Marc was something of a cult in France, where he lived the final part of his life after marrying a French woman. Marc, whose sense of humour was as dry as the Sahara would have smiled wryly.
He was born in 1925 in Trenton, New Jersey and served in the US army in Europe during WW2. Following a decade of small parts as an actor on the stage and American television, he initially made a name for himself as a screenwriter, penning the short story ‘Charade’, which he later expanded into a full-blown screenplay in collaboration with his friend Peter Stone, which became the classic 1963 movie by Stanley Donen starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Two years later, he boarded the Beatles bandwagon and wrote the screenplay for ‘Help’ for Richard Lester and moved full-time to Europe. His later screenwriting assignments were of a journeyman nature, with lucrative but artistically frustrating work for a succession of large scale European co-productions, including ‘Trunk to Cairo’, ‘The 13 Chairs’, early ‘Lady Chatterley’ and Edith Piaf biopics and sundry Charles Bronson and Sylvia Kristel starrers. The screenwriting paid the bills as he shared his time between Paris and the Brittany coast, but it’s his second life as a writer that will ensure he is not forgotten. His first novel ‘The Queen of the Night’ was published to total indifference in America in 1977, a curiously baroque and most deliberately over the top romance set during the Nazi years in Germany which curiously was some fifty years ahead of its time and found echoes in Jonathan Littell’s blockbusting ‘Les Bienveillantes’ last year. He followed this up in 1980 with a crime novel ‘The Eye of the Beholder’ which has since been recognised as a pivotal work in the history of mystery fiction, and has been filmed twice and keeps on being reprinted worldwide. ‘The Eye’ is a private detective whose daughter went AWOL many years before and in his desperate search for her, the detective comes across a mysterious femme fatale with a unique talent for seducing rich men, swindling and then killing them, as she journeys down a tragic road to nowhere; even though he is aware of his own delusion, he pretends she is his daughter and follows her, disposing of evidence and covering her tracks in a sort of road movie with obsession upped to to overdrive. Again, the book had no impact on its initial publication and it wasn’t until three years later that I published it (alongside the first novel and the then unpublished ‘Ice Maiden’, which has long been a film project of Jean-Jacques Beineix) in the UK, where the reviewers went wild for its curious blend of amour fou, crime and fatalism. Of course, in France, Marc’s book had already been acclaimed as a modern classic and a film version of the book, directed by Claude Miller, featuring Michael Serrault and Isabelle Adjani made a major impact as ‘Mortelle Randonnee’. A later English-language version by the director of ‘Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’ Stephan Elliott, was however a bit of a disaster, miscasting Ewan McGregor and Ashley Judd in the main parts.
By then, however, Marc had retired from screenwriting and his writing became something of a hobby. He would complete another five novels, all initially published only in France apart from ‘Afraid to Death’, picked up by No Exit Press in the UK, a fascinating mirror image of ‘Eye of the Beholder’, in which the male character becomes the prey of a female stalker cum angel of death, yet again a striking tale of obsession unbound and a disturbing psychological chiller quite unlike the mainstream of contemporary crime fiction. But then Marc was never one for fashions, moving across genres with an easy contempt for the obligations of modern publishing whereby you stick to one mood and type of story and just keep writing much the same book over and over.
Although highly popular in France in translation, his other novels remain unavailable in his own language, a fact he was quite indifferent to. They include his serial killer epic with a difference ‘Off the Wall’, two picaresque chase thrillers with a memorable heroine with supernatural powers, “Seek to Know No More’ and ‘Crabs’, and the madcap satire of ‘Pulp Novel’. He also wrote a handful of short stories, again collected in book form only in France. Although Marc lived to a ripe old age, I cannot help regretting he hadn’t made a pile of money from dubious film scripts and, spurred on by need, had written more or made stronger efforts to get his books published in the US or Britain. I came across a second-hand copy of ‘The Eye of the Beholder’ in an Oxfam shop on London’s Golders Green Road and made it my mission to create an imprint in which I could publish it. This was the much-lamented Black Box Thrillers. Now that I am myself retired from publishing, I can only hope there will be another dedicated editor out there who will one day be captured by the dazzling folly of Marc Behm’s books and will make those missing novels available. They will astound you.
The news of the death of Marc Behm on 12th July has only just reached me. Unsurprisingly, I can’t even find a single obituary for him since in either the American or British press, and it was through the pages of a French magazine that I actually found out about his passing. Marc was something of a cult in France, where he lived the final part of his life after marrying a French woman. Marc, whose sense of humour was as dry as the Sahara would have smiled wryly.
He was born in 1925 in Trenton, New Jersey and served in the US army in Europe during WW2. Following a decade of small parts as an actor on the stage and American television, he initially made a name for himself as a screenwriter, penning the short story ‘Charade’, which he later expanded into a full-blown screenplay in collaboration with his friend Peter Stone, which became the classic 1963 movie by Stanley Donen starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Two years later, he boarded the Beatles bandwagon and wrote the screenplay for ‘Help’ for Richard Lester and moved full-time to Europe. His later screenwriting assignments were of a journeyman nature, with lucrative but artistically frustrating work for a succession of large scale European co-productions, including ‘Trunk to Cairo’, ‘The 13 Chairs’, early ‘Lady Chatterley’ and Edith Piaf biopics and sundry Charles Bronson and Sylvia Kristel starrers. The screenwriting paid the bills as he shared his time between Paris and the Brittany coast, but it’s his second life as a writer that will ensure he is not forgotten. His first novel ‘The Queen of the Night’ was published to total indifference in America in 1977, a curiously baroque and most deliberately over the top romance set during the Nazi years in Germany which curiously was some fifty years ahead of its time and found echoes in Jonathan Littell’s blockbusting ‘Les Bienveillantes’ last year. He followed this up in 1980 with a crime novel ‘The Eye of the Beholder’ which has since been recognised as a pivotal work in the history of mystery fiction, and has been filmed twice and keeps on being reprinted worldwide. ‘The Eye’ is a private detective whose daughter went AWOL many years before and in his desperate search for her, the detective comes across a mysterious femme fatale with a unique talent for seducing rich men, swindling and then killing them, as she journeys down a tragic road to nowhere; even though he is aware of his own delusion, he pretends she is his daughter and follows her, disposing of evidence and covering her tracks in a sort of road movie with obsession upped to to overdrive. Again, the book had no impact on its initial publication and it wasn’t until three years later that I published it (alongside the first novel and the then unpublished ‘Ice Maiden’, which has long been a film project of Jean-Jacques Beineix) in the UK, where the reviewers went wild for its curious blend of amour fou, crime and fatalism. Of course, in France, Marc’s book had already been acclaimed as a modern classic and a film version of the book, directed by Claude Miller, featuring Michael Serrault and Isabelle Adjani made a major impact as ‘Mortelle Randonnee’. A later English-language version by the director of ‘Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’ Stephan Elliott, was however a bit of a disaster, miscasting Ewan McGregor and Ashley Judd in the main parts.
By then, however, Marc had retired from screenwriting and his writing became something of a hobby. He would complete another five novels, all initially published only in France apart from ‘Afraid to Death’, picked up by No Exit Press in the UK, a fascinating mirror image of ‘Eye of the Beholder’, in which the male character becomes the prey of a female stalker cum angel of death, yet again a striking tale of obsession unbound and a disturbing psychological chiller quite unlike the mainstream of contemporary crime fiction. But then Marc was never one for fashions, moving across genres with an easy contempt for the obligations of modern publishing whereby you stick to one mood and type of story and just keep writing much the same book over and over.
Although highly popular in France in translation, his other novels remain unavailable in his own language, a fact he was quite indifferent to. They include his serial killer epic with a difference ‘Off the Wall’, two picaresque chase thrillers with a memorable heroine with supernatural powers, “Seek to Know No More’ and ‘Crabs’, and the madcap satire of ‘Pulp Novel’. He also wrote a handful of short stories, again collected in book form only in France. Although Marc lived to a ripe old age, I cannot help regretting he hadn’t made a pile of money from dubious film scripts and, spurred on by need, had written more or made stronger efforts to get his books published in the US or Britain. I came across a second-hand copy of ‘The Eye of the Beholder’ in an Oxfam shop on London’s Golders Green Road and made it my mission to create an imprint in which I could publish it. This was the much-lamented Black Box Thrillers. Now that I am myself retired from publishing, I can only hope there will be another dedicated editor out there who will one day be captured by the dazzling folly of Marc Behm’s books and will make those missing novels available. They will astound you.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Kim Howell on
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I too hope that your wish comes true, and we here in the states can enjoy more of his missing books, that were never published here. The stories you described sound really gripping to me, and I'm somewhat surprised they didn't make it here during his lifetime. Thanks for sharing your farewell and opening more peoples eyes.
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