Anyone who enjoys intelligent crime fiction should read Patricia Highsmith, the uncontested queen of the murky psychological thriller where areas of grey predominate. If all you know of her, like many, are her Ripley series and Strangers on a Train or other film adaptations, the reissue programme by Vintage over the coming year of her complete backlist is an occasion for celebration (and delightful new covers). Sharp-edged characterisation with a wicked sense of humour, dispassionate portraits of psychopaths whose attraction can often not be denied and clockwork plots with Swiss-watch precision are just some of the delights in store and this initial batch of three splendid and devious novels is the right place to start. Classics that feel still as immediate today as decades ago.
Those Who Walk Away A Virago Modern Classic Synopsis
The honeymoon is over; the bride dead by her own hand. Ray Garrett, the grieving husband, convinces the police in Rome of his innocence, but not his father-in-law, Ed Coleman, who shoots him at point-blank range and leaves him for dead. Ray survives and follows Coleman to Venice, where the two fall into an eerie game of cat-and-mouse - Coleman obsessed with vengeance and Ray determined to save his reputation, and himself. Each is at once the hunter and the hunted in a tense duel that, as each manages to walk away, draws them nearer to death.
'Bears Highsmith's unique, unsurpassed mixture of unsettling psychological insights, moods of tension and malice, and an ending of brilliant ambiguity' The Times
Author
About Patricia Highsmith, Joan Schenkar
Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was born in Fort Worth, Texas. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was made into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955, introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, and was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1999 by Anthony Minghella. Graham Greene called Patricia Highsmith 'the poet of apprehension', saying that she 'created a world of her own - a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger'. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously, the same year.
