Backlisted - The Eye Of the Beholder by Marc Behm

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Emmy Award-winning writer David Quantick (Veep, The Thick of It) joins Andy and Una for a discussion of Marc Behm's surreal thriller The Eye of the Beholder (1980). David last appeared on Backlisted almost ten years ago, waaay back on episode 5. On that occasion he brought with him Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson. It is no exaggeration to say The Eye of the Beholder gives that novel a run for its money in terms of sheer audacity, originality and mystery. Marc Behm himself was hardly less enigmatic. He won an Oscar for his screenplay for Stanley Donen's film Charade, starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn; in 1965 he co-wrote the Beatles' second feature film Help! As a novelist, he was hugely popular in France, while remaining virtually unknown in America and the UK. We take a close look at The Eye of the Beholder and the long view of his remarkable and unique career.  On Mon 27th Oct 2025, Backlisted is recording a show at 92NY in New York, on William Maxwell at the New Yorker. Tickets are available now from ⁠⁠https://www.92ny.org⁠⁠. On Wed 29th Oct 2025, we will be at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, NYC, recording a special episode on books by Bob Dylan, including Tarantula and Chronicles Vol. 1. Tickets are available now from ⁠⁠https://bitterend.com⁠⁠. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at ⁠⁠uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted⁠⁠ where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit ⁠⁠www.backlisted.fm⁠⁠ *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes and exclusive writing, become a Patreon at ⁠⁠www.patreon.com/backlisted⁠⁠ *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter ⁠⁠here⁠⁠  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. The book featured on today's show is The Eye of the Beholder by Mark Ben. A thriller first published in 1980 by Dial Press in the USA, And then in 1983, by Zomba Press in the UK. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and Inventry, an unreliable guide to my record collection. And I'm Dr. Una McCormack, award-winning author of speculative fictions

and Associate Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge. Now, before we go any further, let me remind you that to celebrate 10 years of us giving new life to old books, backlisted, is coming to new. New York. Yes, for the first time ever, we will be recording two episodes in the States at the end of October. So on Monday, the 27th of October at 7.30 p.m. Backlisted will be appearing at the 92nd Street Y, or 9-2N-Y, in Manhattan. And the subject of the show will be the much-loved editor and writer William Maxwell. We'll be celebrating Maxwell's work via his own novels and short stories, plus that of the writers he championed at the New Yorker magazine,

John Cheever, J.D. Salinger, Elizabeth Taylor, Sylvia Townsend, Warner, with the help of two expert guests, Deborah Treasman, fiction editor of the New Yorker, and our friend, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan. And in addition to 2025, marking the 10th anniversary of Backlisted, it's the 100th birthday of the New Yorker. So it's all very exciting. If you're in New York, or can get there on Monday the 27th of October. Backlisted would love to see you. Tickets are on sale now at 929.org and you'll find that link in the show notes. And then on Wednesday the 29th of October backlisted will be at the bitter end in Greenwich Village where we will be recording another special

episode, this one on books written by Bob Dylan. At last, I hear you say. So we will be discussing his interesting novel Tarantula. His lyrics has collected in the volume writings and drawings, his memoir, Chronicles Volume 1, and possibly if publishing rumors are to be believed, by then even Chronicles Volume 2. Tickets are available now from bitterend.com. And again, check the show notes for the link. We are really looking forward to seeing you there. And yes, I shall be borrowing a guitar for the occasion. So watch out. Yeah, you have been warned. So be very careful, everyone. Well, joining us on today's show to discuss the eye of the beholder and the life and career of its author Mark Bem. We're delighted to welcome back our guest from episode five. David Quantick. David, hello. Sorry, I was just so shocked when you said episode five. Blimey, that's like when they haven't quite got the characters sorted out yet. And some of the plot lines are a bit iffy. Yeah, and I was one of those characters, it's like a fascinating.

service. You've brought me back because I'm really a cult figure. That's right. No one remembers me, but you're desperate so you need more merch. So there's going to be an action figure of me for the older collector. Sorry, it's lovely to be here. I'm really excited to be on backlisted again. Thank you. I've had a lovely time. What number are we now, Andy? What number are we now? This is episode 248, isn't it? And David was you? Yeah. Where were you? Where were you? 243 episodes without me in. And yet Somehow. You've struggled on. We've got there somehow.

Well, David Quantick is a TV, radio and movie writer. He received an Emmy for his work on Veep. And his romantic comedy film Book of Love won an Imagine award in 2022. David has written for many other TV shows in the UK and USA from the day to day and the thick of it to Avenue 5. And he's the author of several sci-fi horror and other novels, including All My Colours, Night Train and Ricky's Hand. His short story collection and other stories is out now.

With Ian Martin, he co-hosts the podcast, The Old Fools, fresh of his triumph, discussing Christy Morrie's own double entry by B.S. Johnson on Backlisted 10 years ago. What a spin-off The Old Fools has proved to be. David, there's a couple of other things in your CV I wish to draw listeners' attention to. amongst your many achievements, and all irony aside, that's a pretty impressive 10 years since we lasted one of these.

But you have been acclaimed and acknowledged as the inventor of the term shit-gibbon. I'm so proud of this. Yeah. Could you just give listeners a posseed history of how that term has spread from humble beginnings, when you invented it into a globally used insult. Certainly. At the end of the 80s,

me and a guy called Stephen Wells, known as Seathing Wells or Swells, wrote a column in the NME called it started off being called Culture Vulture. It ended up being called Ride the Lizard for reasons I don't understand. And we would basically write abusive articles about famous people.

And it was quite wide-ranging. And in one episode, I'm really sorry about this listeners, I referred to Charlie Chapman. or Markey Smith, I referred to one of them as a spunk-faced shit-gibbon, and I knew it was a good line because Stephen Wells, who never praised anyone, said it was funny. So we put it in a couple more times, and I forgot about it. And then when I was writing on, I think it was VEP, I put it in again, and Armando, Yonucci, changed it to something else-faced, shit-faced,

spunk-face, I forget what it was, but anyway, I thought no more about it until a senator who Donald Trump had been abusing, a real one in America, referred to Donald Trump as a Cheeto-faced shitgibbon. And this phrase, which was literally obscure in that it had been used in the enemy twice, it suddenly became part of the discourse. And now I can't go to America because I'll be arrested and deported. Several people have written essays about it. Shitgibbon is now the official term for a portmanteau insult like cockwomble or or shit weasel and so forth. And what I really enjoyed, because I like people who think they know everything.

People online go, yeah, actually it's Scottish. Yeah, it's a Scottish expression. And it's like, what? You've just made that up. No, it's definitely Scottish. Yeah, because Scottish people are always calling each other Gibbons. So, yeah, my one real claim is that I invented an insult, which has been used at Donald Trump.

So thank you, America. Finally, Una, what links the public? work of the authors David Quantick and Andy Miller. Andy, I'm genuinely baffled. I've not got a... Not got a Scooby. I've not got a Scooby. I don't know. David, what links my books and your books? Is it stickers that say $2.99? Very good, very good.

No, it's that David has written a book about an LP and I have written a book about an LP. And those two LPs were released on the same day, the 22nd of November 1968. David's is The Beatles, aka the White Album, and mine is the kinks of the Village Green Preservation Society. Mine's better. Well... The book for the album. Oh, the book. Book's terrible. No. I shouldn't say that because it's being reprinted. The book's marvellous. No. Andy's book is better. Is your book being reprinted?

Just because mine hasn't gone out of print. Oh, I'm really, mine hasn't gone out of print, just to say that. Mine is so out of print, it came out. It actually kept, all those moments when you realize you're not young because it came out so long ago. You think, but that's how old I am. Okay, yes, I see what you mean. Did you find the experience of writing about presumably one of your favorite records?

Did that make you like the record more or less or something else? It didn't really affect it because it's like describing a house that you've lived in for years. And, you know, the Beatles White album famously is a mansion with many rooms. So I just enjoyed it. It was basically a chance to tell people all the stories I had in my head. And because I made most of it up, I don't mean lied. Because I didn't do any interviews. I just, it's just full.

of opinions, which is one reason it became a bit culty. Instead of saying, and on track seven, you can clearly hear Paul has entered up the diatonic scale. It just goes, Paul sounds like a pig being beaten up on this song. And I lost the file because it's so old, like 23 years old. And I bought a copy of the book, and I revised it by typing it from the start and adding new information. And it was really pleasurable. Was it? I made a rule. not to change any opinion unless it was factually wrong. And so what's the big difference between the new and the old version? Updates, really.

I put in footnotes because I find them annoying. And the other thing is updates on what people have been up to, which is most, in George's case, dying, but in Paul's case, having a thriving career. Let's move swiftly along. Una, please would you take us into the book? So the eye of the beholder is a thriller that baffles the reader just as much as it thrills up. In other words, it's a baffler.

It is. If there's a thriller, there's also a baffler. It is indeed. The plot is best described as labyrinthine in that it feels like being lost in a maze with a monster. Or two monsters, in fact, a private detective known only as the eye and a beautiful and deadly seductress named Joanna. So here's a description of the novel from the excellent cult books websites, the Bedlam Files, a private-eye thriller slash psychological case study slash love story that is absolutely the last word on voyeurism. It begins with a private dick known only as the eye, being contracted by a distraught father to track down his errant son.

The latter, it seems, has run off with a mysterious fan fatal. So far, so Raymond Chandler. The young man marries the woman and then on their wedding nights she murders him, all in plain view of the appropriately monikered eye. He trails the woman as she moves on, as she ensnars another man and murders him in turn, and thus begins one of the strangest love stories ever told, as Joanna Criss crosses the country and off's wealthy men and even a few women, shadowed all the while by our non-too heroic hero.

Could Joanna be his own missing daughter, who the eye last saw when she was a child? As the pursuit continues across the states, he surreptitiously helps to hide the bodies of her victims and even finds ways to assist in the murders. As you may have guessed, both protagonists are completely insane, and they're both headed straight to hell. I think that's an excellent encapsulation of this novel, which is challenging, David, which we'll come on to in a minute, as to say the least. Anyway, when Mark Boehm died in 2007,

the crime writer and publisher Maxim Jakubowski, someone who has probably done more than anyone else in the UK, to keep Boehm's name alive, wrote the following. The news of the death of Mark Boehm 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 there, finding an enthusiastic readership with novels like the Queen of the Night, the Eye of the Beholder, and Afraid to Death. Although highly popular in translation, many of his subsequent 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. Although Mark 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 English. I came across a second-hand copy of The Eye of the Beholder in an Oxfam shop in the early 1980s

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, by the dazzling folly of Mark Bem's books and will make those missing novels available. They will astound you. So what are we to make of the mysterious Mr. Bem

whose career encompassed acting and screenwriting as well as writing his confounding thrillers? Or confounders? Where does Mark Bem fit in the literary landscape? Do his novels stand up to 21st century scrutiny and what besides beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When we return, we'll attempt to pin down this alluring and elusive subject. But first, who is the third who always walks beside us?

Why, our sponsors, of course. See you in a minute. Welcome back. So let me begin by asking you, David. When and where did you first encounter the eye of the beholder or the books of Mark Ben? Through the power of theft. I was working for the NME, the New Museum Express, in the 80s as a freelance writer. And because we were more literate then, we got to review books.

And I'm pretty sure that this, the Black Box Thriller edition, three novels by Mark Bem, was in the office. And one or two of the writers, assure me it was brilliant. So I think I stole it because it was free. I've lost my original paperback, but I bought hardback, which is so. signed by Maxim Jakabowski, which is great, because he really did, as you say, did everything to bring Mark Ben back. And when I read this book, I don't know, it's like, it's the, it's the Narnia moment for me. It's walking into the back of a wardrobe and finding yourself in a completely different landscape. It's a private eye novel, but to do bad comparisons, if Raymond Chandler is like smoky jazz in a bar and Dashil Hammer is like,

people being beaten up to the sound of a piano. Mark Bem is opera. Mark Bem is wild, doesn't go in places you expect. His attitudes to things like sex and violence and necrophilia are just extraordinary. He doesn't know any barriers. And to take the private eye novel, which has got more rules than a cricket club, and turn it into something as strange as this, he's just a remarkable writer. And I mean, I will go out on a limb, personally say, the eye the beholder is my

favorite book of all time. Wow. I didn't know that when you approached me to do this show. I'm so happy that that's the case and that you get to bring it to more people. That's so great. Is it in print at the moment, everybody? It is, isn't it? The eye of the beholder? It's an e-book, isn't it? I read it as an e-book. I think this and afraid to death, I was able to pick up quite easily my kingdom. Right. It's easily available. When the latest terrible version, of the story came out. They did a new paperback, which is easily available. There are two or three editions knocking about,

not counting the black box and not counting the original and not counting the electronic version. It's pretty easy to get hold of cheaply. How about you, Andy? Were you familiar with Mark Bem's work? Well, when David mentioned him to me as a possible subject for an episode of Batvested, I did what I always do, which is nodded and say,

yeah, of course that. Mark Bem, yeah, that sounds great. But I couldn't place the name at all. I was thinking, why do I know that name? I really recognise that name. And then after a little while, I realised where I knew it from. And it was as the author of this scintillating piece of dialogue. I've been like to. How on, why, you shall I?

I expect it, don't they? Lovely lads and so natural. I mean, adoration hasn't gone to their heads one jot, as it? You know what I mean. is just so natural and still the sailors they was before they was. David who was that?

That was Dandy Nichols and Ethel from EastEnders in the movie Help. Who are the stars of the film Help? Oh, Leo McCurn and Ellen McHourne. And Ellen O'Bron. We'll talk about Eleanor Bron in a moment.

Victor Spenetti. Victor Sponetti and the Beatles. And that was, as David said, Danny Nichols and Gretchen Frank Franklin, standing in a street in Twickenham, I think, watching the four Beatles enter their, what seemed to be a row of terraced houses, but when they get through the door is only one house. Because Mark Bame was the screenwriter of help, although he had his work anglicised somewhat by Charles Wood, I think I'm right in saying.

Anyway, David, when did you find out he was the screenwriter of help? probably when they invented the internet it was a bit of a shock but presumably Mark Bame got the job at Help is the Beatles' second film after the success of a hard day's night it's filmed only a year later did he get an Oscar for the screenplay of

charade I think he might have done anyway charade had been a big hit presumably he was the fashionable screenwriter du jour and was approached therefore to come up with a thriller a surreal

caper for the Beatles. It doesn't help very much. Even though I'm a Beatles fan, I hate help. It's apart from that one scene where they go in together, which is a classic moment, when you start watching it, it's just like, to be every British character actor browned up,

and the plot is thinner than a, I don't know, a credit card that's been run over by a steamroller. It's an atrocity help, so I have not researched its life. He's completely right, Andy. Yeah, you tell people. Terrible film. You watched this, didn't you, for us?

If I have seen help, I haven't seen it since I was about 13. So I sat down with my knitting and my cup of coffee the other day and popped it on and thought it well, you know, there are moments of shining brilliance, but they are few and far between. But when it is brilliant, you go, oh, you can kind of see the platonic ideal of what this film could have been behind it. but actually that film is probably charade. So. Yeah. The only good thing about help, apart from that scene, is that there's a comedy scene where there's some Indian musicians

and George Harrison picked up a sitar that was one of the props and invented a whole strain of music and culture. That's absolutely correct. That's a pretty good hit rate though for a bad movie. Yeah. And it's kind of nice that he introduced subcontinental culture to the world, having been on the set for a racist movie.

I could not believe how racist it was. That was a big surprise. And that's not a recommendation listeners. That's a warning. If you're looking for a racist film from the world's most popular beat combo, we're going to hear a clip from the trailer of charade in a minute. But Sharray, which was a big hit and starred Carrie Grant

and Audrey Hepburn, clearly help is not representative of Mark Ben. In a sense, charade is quite representative of him. Have you watched that film again, David, since knowing Mark Ben wrote it? Yeah, it's the classic Hitchcock meets Romcom. It's the 39 steps. Man and a woman don't get on. They're literally tied together while everyone else tries to kill them.

And in the end, they get married. Yeah. What makes it Mark Bemish, I suppose, because I think what makes this book great is that you think you're getting a thriller and then you realize you've very. not a nightmare, but the logic of a dream. And the logic of a dream is kind of, it feels like it makes sense, but you know it doesn't make sense. And that happens all the way through charade, I think.

You're kind of being, you'll turn a corner and something's not quite the right shape or it's connected in an odd way to something else. And that pathway through the plot, with its all twists and turns and hyperrealisms and exaggerations, is exactly what happens in Eye of the Beholder as well. and what makes it distinctive, I think. I love that. It is a dream nightmare. All his stuff is a dream nightmare, particularly help.

But, yeah, there's, I mean, I won't right now, but there's a famous thing we'll come on to, but basically, Afraid to Death, he likes to write sister books, and both Queen of the Night and Afraid to Death and Sisters to I have the Beholder. And Afraid to Death is literally a nightmare. Queen of the Night is nightmareish. There's his comedy book, The Ice Maiden. which is about vampires in the 80s. I mean, I think I'm drawn to surrealism.

You know, I like Lewis Carroll. I like Flann O'Brien. There's a thing about surrealism and the private eye novel. There's a reason that French people love private eye novels. There's a reason that surrealist did. They're a fantastic vehicle for anything because the foundation, which is a man or a woman behind a desk with a gun and a bottle of bourbon in the drawer, listening to someone's problems, is a framework you can put anything.

on. They're just a basic quest plot, yeah? But what he does is take that quest into strange places. Afraid to death, I thought, read like Stephen King, actually. Yeah, I mean, that's very interesting. I don't know how aware Stephen King is, but I would say, yeah, it totally is. Because King's got that relentlessness. There's a book called Thinner, about a man, which I love, because it's about a man who's

cursed to get thin. And that's all that happens. And you think, oh, surely there's going to be a twist here. No, he just gets thinner. An Afraid of Death is just a man pursued by a woman who is death. Yeah. And that's the whole book. I like the element in the BAME novels that I've read that in the best, I've said this in the past, but in the best possible way, they feel like he's making them up as he goes along.

Una, do you know what I mean? Yeah. Which fits the idea of dream or nightmare logic. Yeah. Things happen logically, progressively, until suddenly they don't. There's a scene very near that, I'd just say how I feel about it. David, when I started reading The Eye of the Beholder, for the first 10 pages, I was thinking, oh, I'm going to love this. For the next 30 pages, I thought, oh, God, I can't stand this.

This is going to be difficult this episode. And for the remainder of the book, I loved it again. There's almost a kind of swallowing past the gag reflex. And the point at which I thought I might lose it is the scene where the eye is in the park, he buys an ice cream, he eats it and passes out. And I was thinking, what? Why has that happened? And do you know the weird thing is? Yeah, go on.

that I'm a bit obsessed with the language of the book because there's a weird kind of... Are you sure it's set in America? Because everyone keeps smoking Jitaine and reading La Figuero. And I think he wrote this in a real hurry because anyone else would say, maybe, and it was based on a Spanish script, blah-de-blah. But there's this bit in it that you describe.

And in that scene, he passes out. And it's a really weird moment where he suddenly shouts, fuck all! And you don't know if it's the author saying it is. He doesn't shout, fuck all. He shouts the phrase. The phrase, fuck all.

And I'm thinking, because I've got the French edition, because it's got a really good cover, the movie Rondonet Mortel, which I could talk about forever. But I thought, I'll look it up in the French version, see what fuck all is. And that paragraph you describe isn't there.

And what the part, the whole passing out paragraph. No, he buys an ice cream, he sticks on his shoes, and then some other stuff happens. He doesn't pass out. He talks to the little girls and moves on. And it just makes you think,

because I want to get every edition now because it's like was the book translated from French or was it translated into French and who took the paragraph did the French translator go no this is bollocks and cut it

or did Bain just go God why did I put that in David's now entering on his own version of a Calvino novel where he chases the ideal version of I have the beholder

but the serious point is because my brain was primed to read a thriller by the, as you suggest, David, the formulaic nature of the opening pages, such a disruption of the text, as we would have said in the 80s, as having a claiming he'd been poisoned by an ice cream in a park, and then coming to and being aware that he might be arrested for looking like a child molester, is not. of that is not what I normally would expect to get from you said as a Chandler or a Hammett or whatever. So it took me a little while to get my head round that. But as the book went on,

as you suggested, David, in that kind of high operatic, surreal, dream logic style, I thought, oh, this is incredible. The rules are put in place for 10 pages to then systematically trash the rules after that. It's a real feat of... daring, I think. Yeah. I just think that he took the format. He had a... What's really interested about his career is one of those writers who's done one of everything.

Yeah. In that, you know, he did one music film, well, don't count the jazz one. He did one Stanley Donan movie. He did an Emmanuel sequel, Lady Chatterlady's Lover, pseudo sequel. He did one of everything and then just... And his books are like, there's a World War II novel, a vampire novel, a private detective novel. And I think he's one of those writers who would have an idea and then go, where does that idea fit best? The idea of the eye of the beholder is so simple.

A private eye becomes obsessed with a murderess because he believes on one level that she may be his long-lost daughter. So he protects her. And that is the whole book. It's the obvious format. There's no other format where a man could just follow a woman around America aiding and abetting her in some murders. And also it manages to be in there, doesn't it? I would say in the grand backlisted tradition, a book about books, because the narrative eye is one of the things it's talking about.

Who are we watching? Who are we listening to when we read a novel? How are we able to follow the actions of this person or that person? I've found that totally fascinating. And also the extent to which we sort of believe or the extent to which we have to enter the psychosis or the perception of this man. we're only getting it through his eye. So has he passed out?

Has he not passed out? Is this actually happening? Is this all in his head? Is some of this just imagination? All of that is going on as well. The thing for me is there's a quote. Mark Bem himself said, It's the story of God in disguise as a private eye,

searching for his daughter, a quest for grace, which is not bad at all. And it kind of hangs together mostly logically. the book takes place over 30 or 40 years. And during most of this time, the eye is supposed to be employed by an agency who he phones up presumably once a year. He says, I've nearly cracked the case

and they go, have some more money. And you think this agency would last an hour in real life. And the abrupt kind of way that he wraps up the original case is really funny as well. I won't specifically spoil it. But we don't have to worry about that case anymore because the people who were employing of us are no longer care. Yeah, yeah.

Really quite brutal. The other thing, just thinking about the kind of the lens through which we're watching it, it made me think of peeping Tom, Michael Powell's cursed film. I know what you mean. To what's extent is the reader complicit in what is unfolding before them. If you weren't watching, would this be happening? Yeah. To what extent are you rooting for these two?

Particularly as you get more into the psychology of what's happened to her. You're kind of, you're backing her in many ways. It's got the classic thing which I love in a book where you are rooting for at least one bad person. But you talked about the kind of, oh, the voyeur thing. And of course, all the way through the book, she, Joanna, is described in quite sex, salacious terms, often through the eye. She's always undressing or having sex with men and women. or taking showers and being watched by a man who thinks he might be her dad. It's all quite old.

It's kind of pure in some ways, except he keeps going on about her having no clothes on. It's very strange in that respect. I mean, it's also, I have to say, an absolutely beautiful book. There's a personal aspect I wanted to ramble on about briefly, which is that I am adopted. And when I read the book, I didn't know anything about my birth family. and this book is about a man who has his daughter taken from him right and net cannot find her and to me that always made more sense to me that's why he's gone mad that's why he has picked this surrogate daughter and who better to protect a serial killer than a private eye well yeah

that's always given it a thread of internal logic for me and the ending of this book and also drop it in the ending of rondonet mortel which is a fantastic french furrowe of the story and really pairs it down is one of the most moving endings in anything. Sorry, that was a ramble, but I did promise. No, it was, but it was an expressive one. I would like, therefore, to play the clip from the trailer for Sharrade, and I would like listeners to bear in mind everything we've just been saying about Eye of the Beholder, which is written when, David, in the late 1970s.

And Sharrade is the early 1960s, the Stanley Donan film. And just bear in mind the idea of the pursuit and the man and the woman kind of jousting around the world, around the US. And now let's go back to Shared and listen to a little cliff from that. Do we know each other? Why do you think we're going to? I don't know. How would I know? Because I already know an awful lot of people. And until one of them dies, I couldn't possibly meet anyone else.

Well, if anyone goes on the critical list, let me know. As you can see, she was in serious trouble. But she still found time to enjoy herself. Mrs. Lampert, any morning now, you could wake up dead. Of course, she never had as much fun as her husband. Now, he knew how to relax. You see, it all began when he got off the train. Now, there's a relaxed husband.

But he's probably think I killed him. Instant divorce, you mean? From then on, her life was one round of enjoyment. Entertainment. Enchantment? What are you doing in here? I'm having a nervous breakdown. David, that's the eye of the beholder, isn't it?

But it is. It's like the eye of the beholder is. charade noir. It's like it is amazing. It's like one of those when they re-score a horror film

as a comedy and re-edited it because, yeah, it's unintentional, but yeah, Carrie Grant, Audrey Hepburn, age gap,

husbands dying, woman going mad. Yeah, it is. It's basically, I know it's Danny Donan, but it's the Hitchcock version of the eye of the beholder.

But that, and that suggests that when Mark Ben, who we'll hear from in just a minute, when Mark Ben was writing the script of The Eye of the Beholder, which is how the novel came about, perhaps he was trying to pitch something

that felt like a previous hit. You know, it was the thing for which he was probably best known at that point. I don't think it is a coincidence. The tone might be completely different, but they're kind of recognizably the work of the same writer. Yeah, and if he was writing it quickly, then what do you do instinctively? a path that you've already

plotted before, but you tonally or stylistically perhaps alter it as well. Stylistically he seems not to vary very much. I'd like to get into that in a bit, but the plot was already trodden. He's just taking it down something tonally very different.

I think I could easily imagine a version of the eye of the beholder made somehow in 1960 with Carrie Grant as the eye and Audrey Hepburn as as Joanna. We need to take a break here, but this is a perfect moment because when we come back, we're going to hear a very rare clip of Mark Bam himself explaining to an interviewer how he came

up with the idea of Eye of the Beholder. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and vary by race. and conditions apply. Learn more at mx.ca slash yMex. You can get protein at home or a protein latte at Tim's. No powders, no blenders, no shakers.

Starting at 17 grams per medium latte, Tim's new protein lattes, protein without all the work, at participating restaurants in Canada. You can you tell us the history of Mortell Randone? It's a command. A producer of Madrid, Phil Yon. You know, it's he's who he who's called Johnny Gitterer. He wanted the

history, the subject for Charlton Heston. So, I invented this story, I've read quite, but

of course, Heston didn't know not. All the, all the project had abandoneded.

So, I, I, I, I'm said, the story is there, the dialogue,

the Personage, I did make a romance, it's that that I did. And then

it was by Gallimard that he had tried a serenois.

Odiard, Michel has looked, he has found that genius, he has

bought. And there you have it. Now you know how, how

the eye the world that came up. Now, have I entered a dream

logic area or was that all in French? Well, He can speak French because he can speak French. David, what did you pick up from that? The project was abandoned. Charlton Heston was involved. And Mark Bem looks like someone who might kill you in an alleyway. Yeah. And then laugh. You could hang a late 60s ITC film series around him, couldn't you? There's a line that Edward Woodward delivers in Callen. I hit him and he died of it. And that's the kind of line that he could deliver.

Well, what he says, David's quite right. What he basically says there is this was written as a script for Cholten Heston. It was commissioned as a vehicle for Cholten Heston, but he was too afraid to do it. So it was then picked up by Gallimard, translated into French as a novel and published in their seri noir, which is the basis of Mark Bem's then ongoing career as a novelist. I wonder, David, then, when you originally read it. it, did it feel filmic to you? Do these books feel filmic when you read them? Only in the sense that it's a road movie. For those who haven't read the book, the I

travels around America again and again because of the nature of Joanne's life. She has to kill people and keeps moving on in the pre-internet days, becomes untraceable. So yeah, it's filmic in that sense But the weird thing is Because of the whole translation Spanish, French, whatever process You never really feel you're in America And in the movie Rondonet Mortel

It's set in France Which makes a lot more sense It's filmic in the sense And it's a private eye story So it has a noir feel But again, there's the operatic feel as well Can't describe it, it's like No, no, I agree with you

It's very difficult This is one of those great backlisted books that the more you talk about it, the harder it is to pin it down. Yeah. Because it's doing so many things simultaneously that kind of ought not to work really together, but it's held together by force of personality and force of will. There is another film adaptation of Eye of the Beholder

from the Early Nauties starring Ewan McGregor and Hitler. That's right, Hitler, yes. Jane Hitler. Is it Ashley Judd? It is Ashley Judd. I was close. Only joking. You know, they're so easily confused.

She has a terrible time with it. Ashley Judd, a warning from history. I managed 10 minutes of it and then decided to stop. I carried on to the end. I think a review of it said, I was 10 minutes into this film and I went, this is based on a book. And I need to have read this book because I haven't got to do what's going on. I think it would have been terrible at the time. If you watch it now almost as a period piece,

it's got interesting visual things going on, but it isn't very good. And it's the same as casting Charlton Heston, actually, that you couldn't convincingly have those people following someone around for 30 years. And nobody going, you've seen him back there? Whereas I don't know the actor's name in the French version. Your eye would gloss over him.

There is a film which caused some controversy at the time because it was obviously a bit similar to either be held called Black Widow. Oh, that's directed by Bob Rayfelson, isn't it? I have no idea. He's got Deborah Winger in it. Yeah, it is, Bob Rayfelson. The bloke from Third Rock from the Sun. John Lithgow. I'm aware he's done other things.

But yeah, and that takes elements of the eye of the beholder, namely the Black Widow. And also one of the great moments in Eye of the Beholder, as we know, the heroine, so-called. It's constantly killing rich people we don't like. But then there's an awful moment where, spoiler's alert, one of the men is killed, and the eye realizes that she actually loved him. Yeah. And that is pretty much, that's kind of, I think that's what happens in Black Widow, which is an OK film.

But yeah, I mean, the story, the plot is such a great plot that is, there's a reason this film keeps being made or deconstructively made. And yeah, Rondonet Mortel, I've probably watched it more often. often than I've read the book. So I got a bit confused reading the book because I'm thinking, I don't remember that scene where the eye dresses up as a nanny with a pram. Now, the scene where the eye dresses up as a nanny with a pram in order to go undercover in pursuit is another moment, David, where I went,

what? He dresses as a woman with a pram in, I think, Beverly Hills, where being dressed as a butler would have you arrested. Oh, look, there's a private eye dress. as a manner, yeah, it's just, yeah, this strikes me as a script, as somebody who's both a screenwriter and novelist going, I could get away with this in a novel, whereas if, if we try to do this on screen, it would look preposterous. Especially Charlton Heston, I can see what he too.

It's especially Charlton Heston, yeah. Whereas I can do this in prose and see how far ago, oh, no, Andy Miller didn't like it. Never mind. I think with the book, every so often, these mad moments are just someone who's got a script going, this is just the script transcribed. I think I'll dress him up as a nanny or I'll just have him get ice cream poisoning. But yeah, back to Ronda Ney Mortel.

Fantastic casting. Isabella Arjani as the girl is perfect in it. The private eye who's name we can't remember is perfectly anonymous. Those sudden cuts it does as well where you think, has he just blanked out and had an episode that we've not been privy to? It's just increasingly judders.

Am I right that those cuts become more frequent? and I thought the sound started to get a little bit funnier as well, but that could just be, I was watching it online. I do know that for many years you could only get like a 76-minute cut, but they've now restored it. I also want to just say a bit of praise for the music. Carla Blay, who does this fantastic, uneasy jazz, this private eye music, but also slightly kind of mocking.

Yeah. I mean, I love the book so much that I went out and bought the vinyl soundtrack to one to know, as is only right and proper. Could we go back to the book then, David? And would you read us a little bit? Yeah, sure. So listeners can get a taste of what we've been talking about. Okay, I'm going to read from fact fans, halfway down page one.

It was 10 o'clock. The I did the last four crosswords in the paperback, finishing the book. He tossed it into the waste paper basket. At 10.30, he borrowed La Figuero from the girls sitting at Descée. read the headlines, the Carné du jour, the Vincennes racing results, and the program's radio-television. He tried to do the French moquisé, but gave it up. The young swinger at Desk Nine passed in Playboy, and he looked at the nudes. All the girls were lying askew, playing with themselves slyly.

Miss August, far out Peg McGee, left is turned on by Arab movies, skin diving, marler, and zoology. Miss December, Demure Hope, Corngold, Wright, admits her erotic fantasies often involve subways, buses and ferry boats. aboard. He watched the parking lot again for a while. Then at 11.30, he took the photo out of the drawer and studied it. He usually did this for a half an hour or so every morning he was in the office. It was a group shot of 15 little girls sitting at tables in a classroom. His wife sent it to him in 61 in a letter postmarked Washington, D.C. Here's your fucking daughter, asshole. I bet you don't even recognize her, you prick. P.S. Fuck you. It was true. He had no idea which of the children was Maggie. He flown to Washington and spent

two months looking for them, but there had been no trace of them there. Watchman bureaus all over the country tried for ten years to locate them, then had just put the file away in the dead archives. He set the photo against the telephone on the desk, leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. Fifteen little girls with camera shy faces, seven or eight or nine-year-olds. One of them was his daughter. She would be 24 years old this July. I actually find that incredibly hard to read. So I'll stop there, but that was the passage that sold me the book. The thing about that passage, I'm so pleased you read that, David. Whether intentional or not, certainly that opening scene where the eyes described are looking at first pornographic images

and then a photograph of children, of women, of girls, that one way of decoding this novel is seeing it as a novel about the male gaze, about how men look at women, not in only those two categories, but we as the reader are being asked again, like I said, to be complicit in that. First we look at a woman this way, then we look at a woman that way. we think of a woman as a bride or we think of her as a murderer she can of course

be all these things simultaneously a bride, a murderer, a pornographic actress adore somebody's daughter Una I wonder how you felt that plays out in the novel as a whole So obviously it's pretty shocking to juxtapose those I think what I find really interesting

about that It's the way that the affect, the emotion is suppressed, but that you are being given everything there. You are being given his sort of the world that he moves in and has moved in as a private eye. But the central story of his life, which is the loss of his child, the loss of his daughter, and his absolute terror, which is completely suppressed, but you're just given it by juxtaposition, of what might have become of her, because he's seen so much. much of what might become of fatherless girls, I guess, or girls unprotected. Yes, it's filtered through a male eye, but it's more subtle than that, I think.

It isn't exploitative at all. And I think if anyone read it as exploitative, he's a better writer than that. I had a slightly weird feeling reading this book where, you know, Oona and I've been making these shows together for a little while now. I'm, you know, we're friends. But David, I read this book, and it put me slightly on edge at points because I was thinking, is this okay? I wonder what Una will make of this.

You thought I was going to kick off. No, no, I didn't know. No, I know. But in all seriousness, because, you know, some of the scenes are pretty confrontational to you the reader. This will have read in one way in 1980, and I wonder how it reads now. But as soon as we started speaking, you went, oh, I loved it. There's enough going on that it doesn't fall into the trap of being exploitative. It's about exploitation, but it manages rather brilliantly to dodge that trap. That's what I think anyway. And I think a good reader or a,

a kind of reader who's good at reading is going to go, okay, well, when was this written? How do I negotiate that? Do I trust that this is a good writer? Yes, because on a sentence by sentence level, it's manifestly extremely well constructed. So what is he asking me to do as part of the work of reading this book? And can I meet him halfway there?

And sometimes with a book, you read it and you go, well, actually, I'm being asked to do stupid and bad and thoughtless things. I'll probably stop reading this book. Sorry, Andy. But sometimes you're being asked to go on that dream logic walk and see where it takes you. And I think that's okay. It's okay to be confronted. And it is confrontation. It is shocking that I think you're being asked to make that journey in your own mind.

I think the whole conclusion of that debate as far as Bem is concerned is it at the end of the paragraph, which I couldn't actually read, where he describes the girls in the picture and which one might be his daughter and he speculates and it says he no longer had any preferences he knew them all by heart and loved every one of them

and I think that's the eyes attitude you know to him every every woman of a certain age could be his daughter whether she's a prostitute or a murder victim exploited or and the whole thing of the book is not just that he's nuts

he doesn't care about the victims of this woman he cares about her and when we in a later seen when he goes to the children's home that she grew up in. And it's all laid out. She has a reason for her actions. But he never judges. He cares. And nobody else has ever cared. No one cares about her. Nobody has any of the women. Or any of these girls. But he cares. That makes the book have a kind of moral core, perhaps. Yeah. So far from being, so far, I should not have been worried, should I, you know, I should not have been worried.

you be offended. I should have been certain that you would be morally reassured. Well, I was offended by help if that makes you feel. Okay, good, good. That's good. So I've got here the original US First Edition with the copy on the jacket flap. It always amuses on Batlisted to think about the person in the marketing department given the task of presenting a book in such a way that you in the bookshop, we'll pick it up based on reading a few paragraphs. So, David, I will read this jacket copy and you tell me if you think it does a good job of selling the eye of the beholder, okay? Deal.

The woman's first victim is her husband of only a few hours. The sole witness to the murder is a private eye who was hired by the young groom's wealthy parents to identify this mystery woman who've been taking up so much of their son's time. The bride's name is Lucy. And when she returns to her residence hotel with $18,000 of her late husband's money in her purse, her name is Eve. The next day, when she leaves the hotel to meet a young doctor, yes, another doomed groom, her name is Josephine. The private eye is so overcome by this beautiful woman who can seduce and murder men as casually as men change shirts that he forgets both job and clients. And when the eye watches the woman knife her second husband, he is hooked for life.

This time, the woman nets not only $20,000, but also a loving guardian angel. The two of them take off on a wild and dangerous spree across America, leaving a string of I don't know why I'm laughing. Leaving a string of corpses behind. Joanna, with a wig and a personality to match each alias, from high society to see me low life and back again without missing a beat and accumulates a considerable amount of cash in the process. The eye, always peering through windows or lurking behind the wheel of some rented car, blossoms into his own brand of insanity and tails Joanna as efficiently as he throws the FBI off their mutual trail. By the time Joanna becomes aware of her unwelcome shadow, these two fabulously lost,

souls are locked permanently into a wryly symbiotic relationship that provides fertile ground for the blackest comedy. Bloody hell. That is like, listen to somebody describe their holiday. That's just endless. At one point, I thought they were going to, it was like, are they going to provide an accounts book? On the 3rd of June, she withdrew 25,000.

At first, I thought they've just read the first 20 pages and given up. But, oh, God, I've never wanted less to read a book. That's terrible. Well, they're the mission failure. Colossal mission fail. Here we go. In the black book one, he was a detective, she was a murderer. Their odd relationship took them to the very limits as they crisscrossed America,

leaving behind them a sinister trail of corpses. That's how you write a blurb. Yeah, that's straight. Whoa, is that it? That's it because it's a triple volume, three novels in one volume. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. But yeah, that is it.

Punchy. Punchy. All right. So before we hear another reading, Kassuna's going to read us a bit of the text as well and talk us through it. Mark Bame after Sharrade, his next film project was not the Beatles film help. It was a British film directed by Guy Hamilton, who was the director of Goldfinger, the James Bond film. And it starred Oliver Reed, and it was called The Parties Over. it was suppressed by the British censor because of scenes that suggested necrophilia

and not released fully until 1965, after which it disappeared for a very long time until the BFI released it in their flipside range about 10 or 15 years ago. You would not necessarily initially recognise charade, the eye of the beholder and the parties over as the work of the same writer. And yet, once again, just listen to this little clip of an American called Carson trying to find his missing girlfriend. Oh, hi.

Hi. Can I help you? Yes, you can. I'm looking for room number two. I seem to have lost my compass. Room number two? Yes. Melina? Yes, that's right.

We're looking for Melina. Yes, do you know her? Oh, yes. I knew her very well. Knew her. You haven't heard? Heard what? The...

About the operation. What operation? Your cartham, aren't you? Yes, I am. Well, Cartham, they were too late. Just too late. So, you, I'm afraid, just... Too late.

Hey, wait a minute. Just a second. I'd like to ask you another question. Fine, not. No, young lady, just talking. Just round the corner, Manor Street. She's always there. Um, listen.

Um, Mr. Rage, Hector, Marge. Mr. Marsh. Hector. Hector. Has Miss Morgan been ill? Ill, Malina, certainly not. Well, she wasn't an hour ago when I saw her. Manor House, you said?

Manor Street. Just round the corner of the ram. It's a terrible part, but you can't miss it. Oh, thank you. It's the same thing. again. I'm not saying he was one trick pony. He clearly wasn't. But he has an obsession with missing people and men and women jousting with one another and not being certain what is the truth. In all his work except help. Although that's a quest movie. Yeah, one of the things

I thought was interesting about that scene was the girl. I don't know it well. Just like the heroine in, I was behold, the girl is making up stories. Yeah. the beholder, the girl constantly makes up stories about her father. It's very moving. And in this, she's just, the other girl has just invented a terrible operation. It's a, the party's over is an exposee of Beatniks. Thank God, finally. Someone's got the true bravery to say it. Fuck you, Beatniks. That's the hook of it. But within that, it really is that thing again about identity.

It's a film about how do we, how do we know who people, are if they aren't who they say they are. Una, you had a scene for us, I think, that you wanted to read and talk a little about. Yeah, I picked out a scene because I got sort of interested in how his prose worked. And I was interested in, you know, he's a screenwriter, he's a novelist. Is he just, you know, writing up a script, which I don't think he does? And I picked out a chunk, which I think covers everything and kind of shows his craft on several different levels.

So she's under the guise of Eve at the moment, and she's hooked up with a guy called Dr. Bryce, and Bryce has just gone to the bank and taken out a load of money, and the eye is following them. They're in a car, he's in a cab. There's a bit of sweariness in this, so just to give you a heads up. The traffic was murderous. The cabby lost them on Maddox,

found them again on the Mon, lost them again on Riverside, Then three trucks and a jag wedged them into a jam and they stopped dead. Horns blurred. A Doberman poked its python head out of the window of the jag and bade. The eye sprang to the sidewalk, ran up Riverside. A thousand cars were packed in the street. He turned down Gibbon, trotted into the circle, stopped. Where the fuck was he going?

He ran back to the cab. It was still there, squashed between the trucks and the jag. He flopped into it. The Doberman barked at him. The jam broke, the traffic flew. load. They drove into Frederick, past the chapel on Woodlawn. They gave us the slip, the cabby said. Yeah. Whereabouts now? Keep going. Which way? Straight ahead. No, hold it. Stop here. He gave him another five for luck and walked back down Frederick to Woodlawn. He went up a pathway

to the back of the chapel. The triumph was there in the rear parking area. He went into the vestry and tiptoed into the nave. He sat wearily in the last pew. Even Dr. Bryce was standing at the altar, getting married. Her new name was Josephine Brunswick. Three pro-photographers sat on invited in a side pew, so as usual no one paid any attention to the eye, slouched amongst them, holding them an altar. She turned slightly, glancing over her shoulder, looking at what? God Almighty, she was unutterbly lovely. Her beauty stung him. He sat there, His scorpions caress, paralysing him with rapture, her venom warming his blood. Who on earth was this girl?

She had grey, blue, green eyes. She wore a goat on a chain around her neck. She often stood with her hands on her hips. She ate purrs. She spoke chitan. She believed in the stars. She was born on the 24th of December. Capricorn, the winter symbol.

She killed a man last night and robbed him of $18,000. She was going to kill again tonight for $20,000. He slid to his knees and prayed fervidly. Oh, Lord, don't take her away from me. Don't leave me all alone again, braying in the dark like a wounded donkey. I do, said Josephine Brunswick. So there's lots of things I like about this,

partly it's propulsion, the way it kind of takes you through. That staccato of the sentences, I love those similes, that Doberman like the Python. I love the way that the dialogue is just there for a beat. But what I really love, again, we've talked about this just before, is how it swings between that lack of affect.

And these sudden moments of purple prose, too emotional. It's like it goes into a Gothic mode, you know, the fervid, the venom, all of this. It's just really, really well crafted. And if he was knocking this out over a matter of a few weeks, chef's kiss, sir. Chef's kiss. David, what do his books have in common?

If he only does one of each style, how would you know you were reading a novel by Mark Ben? I would say that you are often reading a book with a female lead or co-lead who is morally ambiguous or a vampire or a Nazi. So that side of morally ambiguous. You are reading books where the carpet, which you are admiring, is suddenly pulled out from underneath your feet. and you are reading books which are lying to you because they are genre fiction say a World War II novel

a vampire novel a private eye novel but they are not yes okay are Mark Bairm novels yes yes perfect I have three brief things to say

before we wrap up they are the actor who played the I in Mortel Rondonet is of course Michel Serot Serot the great veteran French actor, no longer with us, unfortunately.

The second thing is, David, it occurred to me while we were talking that the novelist that Mark Bem most reminds me of in terms of logic or lack of it is, I don't know if you've read any novels by John Swartzweiler, the brilliant Simpsons writer. Oh, wow. Well, I'll have to read that then, won't I? But, I mean, Mark Bem's novels are darker. But there is a kind of private detective relentlessness and pastiche and dream logic that they have in common.

And Swartzweiler is funnier, but, you know, I think you would appreciate those. And the third thing is, of course, I couldn't help noticing in the section that Una read, there was a reference to driving down Gibbon. So I think, David, we know finally where you originally derive the inspiration from. It's all from other... Everything I've ever done has been stolen from someone. Just added the word shit in front of the... Again, that's my trademark. Well, that's where we must leave it for this week.

Please lay down your pencils. Many thanks to David for bringing the eye of the beholder to our attention. And thank you to our own electronic... surveillance device, Nicky Birch, for recording our every move. If you would like show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the previous 247 episodes. Including episode five. Yes.

The best episode. The best one. It peaked then, didn't it? Yeah, it did, yeah. Please visit our website at batlisted.fm. To buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, please visit our shop at bookshop.org. choose Backlisted as your bookshop.

And do subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Remember, if you subscribe at lock listener level, you'll get two extra exclusive podcasts every month, installments of my new project, inventory, and a chance to join a community of dedicated listeners and readers like ourselves. But before we go, David, is there anything else that you would like to add about Mark or The Eye of the Beholder that we didn't get to in the show. Just what I've said, that it is my favourite novel of all time, that you really should own it. And if you're too lazy to read a book by Rondonet Mortel, the French adaptation.

Views expressed by guests do not reflect those of the hosts or... I suppose if you're too lazy to read a book, you're probably not listening to this. Now that's our new slogan to mark our 10th year. David, thanks so much for coming back. I promise it won't be another 10 years until you reappear. 12. Thank you so much. That was honestly brilliant.

And it's really been a great opportunity for me to hector people about my true love. Well, that's what we've been doing all this time, hectoring the public. Una, I thank you so much. I really enjoyed this show. It was a delight. Una, I think you really, I could see that you were buzzing off. this one. Yeah, it's one of those things where you kind of, you're the first few pages, you go, oh, if I've been given a thriller to read and then around about page three, I was going,

nah, there's loads more going on here. This is, this is going to be interesting. So I'm really glad to have read there. So I'll be tracking down a few more, I think. All right. Well, thank you very much, everybody. Next time on Backlisted, we will be revisiting a book from Another show, not as early as show five, but maybe it was about show eight or something. I can't really remember. I hate show eight. It's trying too hard.

It's the even-numbered ones that are problematic. Like Star Trek films. If you don't know what we're talking about, that probably means you are a real listener to backlisted. So thank you very much. Thanks, David. Thanks, Ena. Thanks, Nikki.

And we'll see you next time. Bye-bye, everyone. Bye-bye.