The wickedly talented Ms Highsmith

Devils, Lusts And Strange Desires: The Life Of Patricia Highsmith

Bloomsbury, £20

Has the devil ever had a better spokesperson than the American novelist Patricia Highsmith? Her classic thrillers, such as Strangers On A Train or The Talented Mr Ripley, hypnotise you so you find yourself rooting for her evil killers, nodding along when they argue that goodness and decency are cowardly qualities – excuses for not being brave enough to sin. This new biography by Richard Bradford marks the centenary of her birth (she died in 1995). Personally, I can never get enough of reading about this thoroughly unpleasant woman – like her books, her life was somehow both sordid and compelling. Highsmith had a voracious appetite for alcohol, cigarettes and lesbian lovers, especially married ones. She professed to loathe black people and Jews. She seemed to have no real political views but would just offer whatever opinion the person she was talking to would find most offensive. She kept snails as pets and would take them to parties in her handbag, preferring their company to that of humans. Cruelty to animals is the only vice properly punished in her generally amoral fiction. But she was not an exemplary pet owner – she thought it was a shame that her cat never had the pleasure of being drunk so she would swing it around in a sack to replicate the sensation. She spent years stalking a woman she had briefly met once, fantasising in her diaries about murdering her. And when one of her lovers took an overdose after a quarrel, she left her alone and went out for dinner, only calling the doctor on her return several hours later. Richard Bradford thinks that Highsmith spent her life making people miserable and precipitating relationship crises in order to inspire ideas for her books and stimulate the creation of horrible characters. One girlfriend, he writes, proved totally unsuitable because she “had an abundance of patience and imperturbability” and Highsmith returned from a holiday with her feeling “horribly disappointed” because “they’d had a lovely time”. Bradford’s caustic wit helps to make this shortish book an entertaining summary of Highsmith’s life. He cunningly catches her out in a lot of lies about herself and confidently, if not always convincingly, finds ways of showing that her plots and characters were based on events and people in her own life. His new interpretations of familiar material can be intriguing but he hasn’t unearthed much that previous biographers haven’t pored over. I suspect we’ll get fresher insights into Highsmith’s mind when her diaries are published for the first time later this year – a prospect both exciting and rather terrifying.