Eye of the Beholder by Marc Behm


 Marc Behm wrote the screenplay for Help!. His novel, The Eye of the Beholder, has the same manic energy as that classic piece of madcappery.  It is an account of a private eye known only as the Eye who is both looking for the daughter who he hasn't seen since his wife left him when the girl was one year old—his absent wife sends him a picture eight years later of little girls in a classroom and taunts him by pointing out that he won't know which one of them is his daughter—and a woman who is in the habit of seducing men, and then killing and robbing them. His relationship with this murderer quickly changes. She is at first his quarry, but then he becomes a sort of guardian angel for her, following her, stalking her, observing her life as she pinballs around the United States and, unbeknownst to her, helping to ensure that she gets away with her crimes.

It's undeniably true that the great realist novels of our time are detective novels, but this is not one of those. Eye of the Beholder is kept at a healthy remove from realism by that Help!-like manic energy that drives it, and by the characters who are reminiscent of Sailor and Lula from Barry Gifford's Sailor and Lula novels. As with Sailor and Lula, the Eye and the woman he shadows for over a decade, Joanna Eris, begin ordinary, but, by novel's end, are epic.

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