The Crime Writer by Jill Dawson review – inside the mind of Patricia Highsmith

Fantasy turns to violence as Highsmith, the protagonist and subject of this novel, becomes fixated on her female lover

In an era that favours dark suspense and unhealthy passions, a novel about Patricia Highsmith could hardly be more timely. Published a few months after the release of the acclaimed Highsmith adaptation Carol, Jill Dawson’s The Crime Writer explores the life and work of an author whose themes emerged a good half century ahead of the current taste for domestic noir or the psychological thriller.

Highsmith is both rated and periodically neglected: sidelined as a crime novelist, she has never quite been awarded the lofty place in the canon she deserves, though Graham Greene labelled her “the poet of apprehension”. As well as 22 novels, she produced exquisite short stories, many written at a very young age. She had a strange and interesting life, meticulously portrayed in Andrew Wilson’s biography Beautiful Shadow and then again in Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith. Her “little hell” of an American childhood was followed by a peripatetic existence in Europe, literary success that resulted in several film adaptations – most notably Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley – and a highly complex personal life. She seduced a string of women, bred snails, suffered from severe depression, became an emotionally avoidant alcoholic and was variously viewed as kind, witty, and a nightmare. As one of her publishers, Otto Penzler, said she was “mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving … But her books? Brilliant.”

Continue reading...