Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and moved to New York when she was six, where she attended the Julia Richman High School and Barnard College. In her senior year she edited the college magazine, having decided at the age of sixteen to become a writer. 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' and The Times named her no.1 in their list of the greatest ever crime writers. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously, the same year.
To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability * Sunday Times * I love Patricia Highsmith . . . What a revelation her writing was -- Gillian Flynn The sheer macabre, amoral brilliance of Patricia Highsmith surely makes her one of the finest writers in the English language -- Richard Osman If Patricia Highsmith, in her novels, holds us hostages in a maze of dark dreams, inexplicable desires, and irrational urges, in her short stories she breaks down the maze, wedges its fragments in our minds, and leaves it to us to rebuild the phantom maze and submit ourselves again to her grip -- Yiyun Li A writer who has created a world of her own - a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger . . . Highsmith is the poet of apprehension -- Graham Greene For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith * Time * Every story shimmers like a dark gem as Patricia Highsmith turns her gimlet eye on domesticity, suburban madness, toxic families and the loneliness of childhood. Often mordantly funny and always psychologically acute, this collection is not to be missed -- Megan Abbott By opening this book, you've given Patricia Highsmith permission to follow you, catch you, take you apart. Get ready to run. -- Carmen Maria Machado