Peter Walker (pw@pw.cablenet.co.uk)
Fri, 25 Jun 1999 20:10:03 +0000
"The Eye of the Beholder" is back with us. Re-issued as a
book and soon to be a film. Hard boiled and noir credentails
beyond reproach. Maxam Jackbukowski - of Murder One bookshop
in the UK - says it is "the best PI novel ever written.....a
roller-coaster ride that combines poignancy and metaphysical
anguish: a book that stands alone in the field like an
unpolished diamond". For those of you who missed it here is
something I wrote earlier: For my money it is one of those
books written in the genre but not 'off' the genre. Behm's
say's:
"It's the story of God in disguise as a Private Eye,
searching for his daughter: a quest for grace" (Quoted in the
introduction to the Black Box Edition of Behm's three
novels). This is fair enough (although this does raise the
possibility of some Hotel Dick spotting a weird looking guy
sitting in the lobby reading a paper with two eye holes in it
and asking Spade, like that scene in "The Maltese Falcon":
"Who's the Punk?" to which Spade replies; "Its just God, on a
job" ). Anyway, amongst many other things, it does raise the
question of 'The Eye" as an 'eye' i.e. just what is it we
actually 'see' when we see something (or more to the point
when someone sees something for us). The answer for Behm is,
I suspect, 'you don't see things the way they are but the way
you are'. Or, to put it another way, just how do men see
women in this hard-boiled genre? It stated as a film script
for Philip Yordan and then became a book and is now a second
film script (the first was turned into a film by Claude
Miller) with Ewan MacGreggor. On a final point, Behm said, in
response to the critical acclaim that followed the book and
labelled him the new Hammett, that "I've read my share of
contemporary thriller writers and I still find that Graham
Greene is the master of us all. I find Chandler rather boring
and Hammett, although nice to read, belonged to a school of
writing I find tiresome." Sacrilege! Wonder if he'd like
Hannibal? Peter
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