This book is a treat. Most of the twenty-eight stories here have never been published before. Others have appeared in a variety of recherché journals, such as German Playboy. Patricia Highsmith made her name as a crime novelist with her debut, Strangers on a Train. It was published when she was twenty-nine and was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. Her five Ripley novels cemented her reputation. However she tended to hide her short stories under a bushel – her first collection, Eleven, did not appear until 1970 – and she destroyed many ‘rotten, old stories’ that did not meet her exacting standards. When she died in 1995, unappreciated in her native America, she left behind a huge archive of papers that stretched 150 feet in length. It is a tribute to the editors of this volume that they have ploughed diligently through her files and rescued these tales from oblivion. Two or three of them stand comparison with her best work.

The fourteen early stories, which date from 1938 to 1949, show she had a remarkable facility for the short-story form from an early age. They are complex psychological tales masked by a deceptively simple style. Graham Greene commended her as a poet of apprehension rather than fear. This book provides ample proof of his dictum. She can instil foreboding with just a stroke of her pen. An empty restaurant is described as ‘a cemetery of white-clothed tables’. A tramp’s ear is ‘a daub of white flesh like the opening of a balloon tied with string’. In Highsmith’s fiction the Devil is in the detail.

Her characters are middle-aged men and women who lead unremarkable lives. They tend to be oppressed by routine and city life. New York, the backdrop for many tales, is ‘unfriendly’ and ‘its cramped fury seemed like a disease’. People are as insignificant kitchen matches or candle wicks.

A post-office employee fantasises about murdering his fellow workers to escape his daily drudgery. A man props up a bar day after day waiting for someone to walk in and rescue him. Hopes are raised and cruelly dashed. A shopkeeper is left a huge financial bequest and then loses it all overboard a ship.

The stories are by no means faultless. There are quite a few duff lines (‘the ponderous sun that staggered throbbingly upward’ – have you ever seen the sun stagger?) and rather too many melodramatic denouements. ‘A Girl like Phyl’ is about a man who recognises the daughter of an old lover on a plane and invites her back to his hotel room without letting on about his previous dalliance. The girl ends up propositioning him. It is a wonderful conceit but the story is marred by its contrived ending. Too often the tales conclude in murder or suicide. The conventions of the crime genre were clearly hard to shake off.

Paradoxically, it is the quieter tales that create more of an impression and linger longer in the mind. ‘Where the Door is Always Open and the Welcome Mat is Out’ features a neurotic New Yorker being visited by her sister in her noisy, confined apartment. Far from being an occasion of joy, the visit only compounds her sense of failure. The women in this volume are given more depth and poignancy than their male counterparts.

Mrs Blynn on her deathbed reflects that life ‘is a long mistaken shutting of the heart’. The strait-laced Mrs Robinson looks on at a pair of lovers in the park with a mix of longing and pride: ‘the blond girl had seen the glance, seen in it for all its fleetness the ancient and imperishable look that one woman gives another she knows is well loved, a look made up of desire, admiration, wistfulness, of envy and vicarious pleasure, unveiled for an instant and then veiled again’. It’s the veiling and unveiling of emotion that Highsmith captures with such scrupulous accuracy.

In the opening tale, ‘Mightiest Mornings’, ‘the train crept on northward, carrying into nowhere the prints of his ten fingers on its gritty sills’. Luckily, the prints Patricia Highsmith left behind are still with us.