Dangerous and Beautiful Women- Patricia Highsmith

Greatest Crime Authors

Patricia Highsmith, author of famous Talented Mr.Ripley, was hard drinker, lesbian, defied social taboos in the 1950’s by flaunting her affair with another woman, her own life was full of dark secrets.

“… She was more beautiful than most other female socialites at the London party, and her handbag was larger. When she opened it, in a flamboyant gesture, those close to her recoiled in horror. Inside was a giant head of lettuce and 100 of the garden snails that Patricia Highsmith treated as her friends and pets. For a time, Highsmith’s obsession was so intense that she never travelled without a mollusc army to keep her company… ”-(from Daily Mail)

Patricia Highsmith broke nearly all of the rulings that determine the writing of crime fiction. She followed none of the usual formulae. There are no courageous cops, tough private eyes or amateur private detectives; often there is no mystery and therefore no solution; good does not necessarily triumph over evil.
“When the dust has settled and when the chronicle of twentieth-century American literature comes to be written, history will place Highsmith at the top of the pyramid”- A.N. Wilson, critic and novelist, author of the best book about Patricia Highsmith Beautiful Shadow.
Graham Greene famously called her “a poet of apprehension” who had “created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.”
Obscurities, most of them definitely unbeautiful, possessed Highsmith during her life. Five months earlier she was born, her mother, Mary Plangman, attempted to get rid of her by drinking turpentine (”It’s funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat,” Mary would tell her years later) and nine days before her birth, her natural parents were acceded to a divorce. Patsy, as she was called as a kid, was constantly uncomfortable in the company of her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, which makes it all the more stunning that she adopted his name when she became a writer.
Highsmith’s biographer Andrew Wilson in his study “Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith” deftly traces her regard for the amoral and misanthropic back to her lonely formative years. Highsmith started reading books on psychology and psychopathology when she was 10, and from these she progressed to Nietzsche and other writers whose principal concern was the isolation of the individual.
Patricia Highsmith indicated creative talent from an early age – she painted and remained talented sculptor, but she had decided to be a writer. She had written as teenager stories and edited the school magazine at Barnard College, and after leaving college she worked with comic books, supplying the writers with plots. Before her first book, Highsmith had a number of jobs, including that of a saleswoman at a New York Store.
With the publication, in 1950, of Strangers on a Train, discerning readers acknowledged at once that Highsmith was a serious novelist and not a conventional crime writer. In this brilliant debut novel, she creates one of the most complex of her varied assassins – Charles Anthony Bruno, the bored playboy with a penchant for gaudy ties and a determination to commit the perfect murder. Bruno is Tom Ripley in waiting, for where he fails Ripley succeeds.
Highsmith’s second book, The Price of Salt, appeared under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, because its subject is lesbian love – a topic not exactly favoured in the grim days when Senator McCarthy’s voice was bellowing in the land. It was inspired by a chance encounter. The novelist was working in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s, the New York department store, when a handsome blonde came in to buy a doll for one of her daughters. Highsmith took her name and address for purposes of delivery, and actually went to the woman’s house in New Jersey to see where the object of her fantasy lived. Wilson discovered that she was Kathleen Senn, that Highsmith never met her and that she was an alcoholic who killed herself. When The Price of Salt resurfaced in 1990, it was retitled Carol, and it is now in its rightful place in the Highsmith canon.
The five Tom Ripley books set up Highsmith as a genuine original in crime fiction, and a superb writer. The first, The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), introduces the charming, good-looking, bisexual, conscience-free con man who goes on to become a killer. He is amoral and a psychopath. Yet, far from being repulsive, he emerges as a sympathetic, even attractive, character.
Highsmith liked Ripley so much that she made him the hero of five novels, starting with The Talented Mr Ripley and ending with Ripley under Water. After The Talented Mr. Ripley the contradictory hero looked in several sequels, among them RIPLEY UNDER GROUND (1970), in which he both masks as a dead painter and kills an art collector, RIPLEY’S GAME (1974), a story of revenge, in which Ripley is paired with a first-time murderer, THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED RIPLEY (1980), and RIPLEY UNDER WATER (1991), the final Ripley adventure, in which Ripley is pursued by a sadistic American, who knows too much of his past. This time Ripley doesn’t kill anybody. “The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels, the sense that ideas and attitudes alien to the reasonable everyday ordering of society are being suggested, has made many readers uneasy. One closes most of her books — and her equally powerful and chilling short stories — with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had imagined“-Julian Symons in The New York Times.One of the causes Highsmith was never as popular in her own country is that many Americans simply couldn’t stomach the conception of a charming, civilised murderer who always gets away with it. Ripley should have been sent to the chair a dozen times, but he is still here, still smiling.
Patricia Highsmith’s readers so far experience that she was a woman of many voices. She conducted to produce works that are each so dissimilar it can be hard to conceive they are written by the same person. It may be the multiplicity of her work, and the fact that it cannot be categorized—if she is basically a crime novelist, she is emphatically not a writer of detective stories—that has delayed American enjoyment of her extraordinary talent. Closely every one of the dozen books she wrote among her first novel and Ripley Under Ground is unique in the different ways they make irrational behavior seem certain. She has also been, without intending it, a prophet: The terrors and delusions driving her psychopaths to violent action are the ones we see enacted now in the apparently motiveless crimes recorded in our daily newspapers.
Highsmith lived all her life by her pen and typewriter (an Olympia manual), starting off by producing copy for comics and later turning out a steady stream of suspense and horror stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Her novels never became popular in the US. Here she might sell only four thousand copies of, say, Edith’s Diary (1977)—and ten times that number in France or Germany. Little wonder that she preferred to spend her later years in Europe. The English-speaking world might casually slot her as a writer of crime fiction, but Europeans honored her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition represented by her own favorite writers, in particular Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gide, and Camus. (That astute critic Brigid Brophy once called her a Dostoevsky “whose gifts include humour and charm.”) Highsmith’s books, after all, explore human souls in extremis, chronicle men and women sliding toward breakdown, probe the fluid nature of identity, and generally conclude that life is little more than an absurdity and a cheat, when not a downright horror.
She was also unhappy with the film adaptations of her novels, though she did acknowledge the brilliance of Robert Walker’s Bruno in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Only Rene Clement’s Plein Soleil (based on The Talented Mr Ripley) came close to catching her peculiar quality – until the last reel, when Alain Delon as Ripley gets his just deserts.

Patricia Highsmith’s Books list:

Strangers on a Train (1950)
The Price of Salt (as Claire Morgan) (1952), also published as Carol
The Blunderer (1954)
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)
Deep Water (1957)
A Game for the Living (1958)
This Sweet Sickness (1960)
The Two Faces of January (1961)
The Cry of the Owl (1962)
The Glass Cell (1964)
A Suspension of Mercy (1965), also published as The Story-Teller
Those Who Walk Away (1967)
The Tremor of Forgery (1969)
Ripley Under Ground (1970)
A Dog’s Ransom (1972)
Ripley’s Game (1974)
Edith’s Diary (1977)
The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980)
People Who Knock on the Door (1983)
Found in the Street (1987)
Ripley Under Water (1991)
Small g: a Summer Idyll (1995)

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