There’s no escape

Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection of them in her handbag, who abandoned her native America for a restless life in Europe, and who turned a habitual paranoia into literature.

Now, 20 years after her death, her reputation has been substantially increased by film versions of her Ripley novels and, most recently, Carol (an adaptation of The Price of Salt, her extraordinarily bold novel of a lesbian love affair). For all that, she is generally classed as a crime writer, albeit a very superior one. As one contemporary reviewer commented, ‘Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.’

Now Jill Dawson has turned her into the central character of a novel. Ventriloquy is Dawson’s forte — earlier novels have channelled the voices of Rupert Brooke, the Wild Boy of Aveyron and Edith Thompson, executed for murder in 1923. Her novels revel in the way the past infiltrates the present.

The Crime Writer is set in 1964, when Highsmith rented a cottage in a Suffolk village. Her stay there gave her the setting she used in A Suspension of Mercy, a strange novel (even by her standards) in which the boundaries between the real and imagined are shadowy and ill-defined.

The same could be said of The Crime Writer. Highsmith is pursuing a secret love affair with Sam, a married woman she met in London. She is working hard and drinking heavily. The past lies heavily on her — particularly her traumatic experiences as a child with her parents and her step-father. The only bright spot in her emotional life seems to be her friendship with her neighbour, the young Ronald Blythe, who is gathering material he later published in Akenfield.