What I Am Reading: "Eye of the Beholder" by Marc Behm
This second foray into detective fiction skips ahead a half-century. I first found Marc Behm from his entry on a list of novels set in Weimar and Nazi Germany, where his entry was particularly lurid. A bit of background research - expat in France, half of his books haven't been translated into English, couple of modestly prominent detective novels - set off my "cult classic" detector for his novel Eye of the Beholder.
The novel's story is simple, and something that we might find problematic today: a man following a woman around. The protagonist, known only as "The Eye," is a private investigator at a large firm, who is assigned a routine case whereby the parents of an heir want to investigate his new girlfriend. The Eye follows this heir while he picks up his girlfriend and takes her to a vacation cabin, where he watches her murder him. The Eye, remaining hidden, helps conceal the murder, and follows the woman as she repeats the process. She is a serial killer: roaming the country seducing, killing, and robbing men and women.
She is bewitching and otherworldly enough to constantly attract these lovers, but The Eye is already biased toward an obsession with her. His ex-wife took his daughter when she was young, and he has never been able to reestablish contact with her. He dreams constantly about visiting his daughter at school; his wife sent a classroom portrait, but did not label which girl she was. She would be about the age of the serial killer now, and The Eye concocts an internal narrative about the two “women in his life.”
He traces back the serial killer’s hardscrabble life to an orphanage near Trenton, New Jersey (and some of the book's action takes place in the neighborhood I work in). Her name turns out to be Joanna Eris; during an early stint in prison, the female prison psychiatrist fell in love with her, and nurtured an interest in literature and astrology. Now she roves across the country, killing, robbing, and moving on. She changes identities and appearances depending on cities. She rereads Hamlet repeatedly, and takes her cues from newspaper horoscopes for her sign, Capricorn. Her identity changes, multiple marriages, and inscrutable motivations brought to mind the Christina Hendricks character from Firefly, "Yo-Saff-Bridge," the deadly femme fatale who marries several characters in the show with criminal intent.
The book follows The Eye as he follows her, remaining hidden but intervening occasionally to help cover up or escape her crimes. She is vaguely aware of her presence, but seems to think that he is just a figment of her imagination, perhaps a "guardian angle" that she has conjured. At various points she falls in actual love, but has her newfound life disrupted by a tragic accident; The Eye loses her, but manages to deduce where she has gone to hide and why; and has her crime spree pieced together by the FBI, who are hot on her trail. I'll decide not to spoil the ending, but many elements of the plot do end up coming full-circle in a satisfying way, and The Eye eventually breaks cover, in a way. This was a good second try at detective fiction. There is in fact a companion novel, and that will go on the reading list.