Friday, June 5, 2020

Marc Behm / A writer lost to translations

Marc Behm

A writer lost to translations

Marc Behm was a terrific American novelist. So why are his books only available in French?

Maxim Jacobowski
Friday 21 September 2007

The news of the death of Marc Behm on July 12 has only just reached me. Unsurprisingly, I haven't seen a single obituary in either the American or British press - it was through the pages of a French magazine that I found out about his passing. (He was something of a cult figure in France, where he spent the final part of his life after marrying a French woman.)

Behm was born in 1925 in Trenton, New Jersey and served with the US army in Europe during the second world war. Following a decade of small parts as an actor on the stage and US television, he initially made a name for himself as a screenwriter, penning the short story Charade, later expanded into a full-blown screenplay in collaboration with his friend Peter Stone. The film that resulted, directed by Stanley Donen and starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, is widely acknowledged as a classic.

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 including Trunk to Cairo, The 13 Chairs, an Edith Piaf biopic and sundry Charles Bronson and Sylvia Kristel vehicles. 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 should 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 deliberately over-the-top romance set in Nazi Germany which was 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, has been filmed twice and is constantly reprinted worldwide.

The Eye is a private detective whose daughter has been missing for many years. In his desperate search for her, he comes across a mysterious femme fatale with a unique talent for seducing rich men, swindling and then killing them. 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 overdrive.

Again, the book had no impact on 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, though, 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. This latter is a fascinating mirror image to 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. It was 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 it over and over.

Although highly popular in France in translation, his other novels remain unavailable in his own language, a fact to which he was quite indifferent. They include his serial killer epic Off the Wall, two picaresque chase thrillers with a supernaturally gifted heroine, 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 can't help regretting he didn't write more or make stronger efforts to get his books published in this country. I came across a secondhand copy of The Eye of the Beholder in an Oxfam shop and made it my mission to create an imprint in which I could publish it. Now that I am myself retired from publishing, I can only hope there will be another 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 GUARDIAN