Patricia Highsmith Biography and List of Works

American mystery writer, whose works were especially successful in Europe. Highsmith's grim novels explored the psychology of guilt and the effects of crime upon individuals in society. She also published several volumes of short stories in the fields of fantasy, horror, and comedy.

"But the beauty of the suspense genre is that a writer can write profound thoughts and have some sections without physical action if he wishes to, because the framework is an essentially lively story. Crime and Punishment is a splendid example of this. In fact, I think most of Dostoyevsky's books would be called suspense books, were they being published today for the first time. But he would be asked to cut, because of production costs."
(from Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, 1966)

Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in New York. Her parents, who separated before she was born, were both commercial artists. Her father was of German descent and she did not meet him until she was twelve - the surname Highsmith was from her stepfather. For much of her early life, she was cared for by her maternal grandmother. Highsmith was educated at Julia Richmond Highschool in New York and at Columbia, where she studied English, Latin and Greek, earning her B.A. in 1942.

As a child and in her youth Highsmith showed talents in arts - she painted and remained talented sculptor, but she had determined to be a writer. As a teenager she had written stories, 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.

As a writer, Highsmith made her debut with STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, which appeared in 1950. It depicted two men, a tennis star and a psychopath, who meet on a train, and "swap" murders. "Some people are better off dead -like your wife and my father, for instance," states Bruno, the rich psychopath and proceeds to carry out his part of the bargain.

"Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament! People get so far - and it takes just the least little thing to push them over the brink. Anybody. Even your grandmother. I know."
(from Strangers on a Train)

The cunningly plotted melodrama inspired the director Alfred Hitchcock who made it into film. Both the book and the film are considered classic in the suspense field. The story has also been filmed later, in 1969 under the title Once You Kiss a Stranger, directed by Robert Starr, which was an empty and failed version. Danny DeVito' spin-off Throw Momma From the Train (1987) turned the story into black comedy.

In 1953 appeared Highsmith's THE PRICE OF SALT under the pseudonym Claire Morgan after her publishers had turned it down. In its time the unusual homosexual love story sold almost a million copies and was reissued with an afterword in 1991 under the title CAROL. Highsmith dealt with sexual minorities in her other works, and her final novel, SMALL G: A SUMMER IDYLL (1995), depicted a bar in Zurich, where a number of homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual characters are in love with the wrong people.

In 1957 Highsmith won the French Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere and the British Crime Writers Association awarded her a Silver Dagger in 1964. Her most popular character is Tom Ripley, a con man and bisexual killer, who was introduced to the world in THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1955). It was first filmed in 1960 under the title Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), and directed by René Clément , starring Alain Delon. The clumsy but likable murderer Ripley inspired the Wim Wenders film The American Friend (1977), starring Dennis Hopper, Bruno Ganz, Samuel Fuller, and Nicholas Ray.

In Anthony Minghella's film from 1999 Highsmith's homosexual subtext is not hidden. In the story, a millionaire asks Ripley to track down his son, Dickie, who is living in Italy. The prodigal son and Ripley became friends, but when Dickie wants to get rid of his new associate, Ripley starts to lie and kill to continue the high life he has found so attractive. Dickie vanishes, and Ripley appropriates his identity for fun, profit and to fill the emptiness of his own character.

Ripley became Highsmith's most enduring character. He appeared in several sequels, among them RIPLEY UNDER GROUND (1970), in which he both masquerades as a dead painter and kills an art collector, RIPLEY'S GAME (1974), a story of revenge, THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED RIPLEY (1980), and RIPLEY UNDER WATER (1991), the final Ripley adventure, in which the almost virtuous character in pursued by an greedy American. As a reclusive person, Highsmith spent most of her life alone. She moved permanently to Europe in 1963, living in East Anglia and France. Her final years Highsmith spent in an isolated house near Locarno on the Swiss-Italian border. - She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995.

"Her peculiar brand of horror comes less from the inevitability of disaster, than from the ease with which it might have been avoided. The evil of her agents is answered by the impotence of her patients - this is not the attraction of opposites, but in some subtle way the call of like to like. When they finally clash in the climactic catastrophe, the reader's sense of satisfaction may derive from sources as dark as those which motivate Patricia Highsmith's destroyers and their fascinated victims."
(Francis Wyndham in Lesbian and Bisexual Fiction Writers, ed. by Harold Bloom, 1997)

Highsmith's works outside the mystery genre include a juvenile book, short stories, and non-fiction. In PLOTTING AND WRITING SUSPENSE FICTION (1966) she stated that "art has nothing to do with morality, convention or moralizing." In his study about the author Russel Harrison argues, that Highsmith's fiction demonstrates elements of existentialism as linked to Sartre and Camus, and reflects sociopolitical concerns to the gay and lesbian issues of 1980s and 1990s.

For further reading: Mystery and Suspense Writers, ed. by Robin W. Winks (1998, vol. 1); Lesbian and Bisexual Fiction Writers, ed. by Harold Bloom (1997); Patricia Highsmith by Russell Harrison (1997); Über Patricia Highsmith, ed. by Franz Cavigelli and Fritz Senn (1980)

"Miss Highsmith is a crime novelist whose books one can reread many times. There are very few of whom one can say that. She is a writer who has created a world of her own - a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger..."
(Graham Greene, 'Introduction' to THE SNAIL-WATCHER, 1970)

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, (1950)