Jessica Mann
Student of Suspense
Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith
By Andrew Wilson
Bloomsbury 534pp £25 order from our bookshop
UNPLEASANT FACTS ABOUT favourite writers can tarnish their work, but this literary biography came as a relief, even a vindication. It turns out that Patricia Highsmith was quite as detestable as I find her books - though they were undeniably extraordinary. She was a true original, who wrote powerful, memorable novels of suspense which were neither mysteries nor thrillers but meticulous studies of criminal psychopathy. They anticipated, perhaps prophetically, society's current fascination with serial, sadistic murder, in fact and in fiction. Highsmith created a claustrophobic, irrational world in which there is no right or wrong, and where moral rules and judgements are neither good, bad nor necessary, just irrelevant. Her Before most popular books, the Ripley series, describe a man, born without any of the usual inhibitions, who flourishes through crime. He is charming and cultivated, an art forger, and a killer without conscience, laughing at the sight of his victims burning in a car or their bodies thudding into a grave. The writer Will Self said reading his first Highsmith book 'was a physical experience of being confronted with evil'. I put my first away because I felt tangible evil coming off the page.
The country of the moral majority, Highsmith's native America, never took to her books, which sold poorly there. American publishers were stdl rejecting her manuscripts at a time when she had already become wildly successful in Europe AM - where she felt much more at home, spending the second half
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As we examined more and more data from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters ... we were amazed to find that there is almost never a case for permanently moving people out of the contaminated area after a big nuclear accident.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying
'This problem has dogged Labour’s efforts to become the "natural party of government", a sobriquet which the Conservatives have acquired over decades, despite their far less compelling record of achievement.'
Charles Clarke on Labour's civil wars.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/comrade-versus-comrade
'Lamb has always attracted admirers ... Yet, as Eric G Wilson observes, "Dream-Child" is the first full-scale biography in over a century.'
Edward Weech on the life and work of Charles Lamb.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-man-with-the-golden-pun