P ublisher and bookseller Otto Penzler has loved Patricia Highsmith’s work all his life, but their first meeting was a washout. In 1984, she agreed to give a reading at The Mysterious Bookshop, his store on West 56th Street in New York. The American author of the Ripley novels, then 63, had lived in Europe for 20 years – in England, then France, then Switzerland – and seldom made public appearances, so he had high hopes.
“But no one showed up. We had maybe four people,” Penzler says from his book-lined office under the shop. Now 84, with a tidy white beard and a warm, amused manner, he is just back from a crime fiction convention and still very much in the game. Highsmith, he recalls, had little time for her readers. “She was somewhat taciturn. People got their book signed and left within five minutes. I had a two-hour event scheduled, so what does one do? With some authors, I can say, ‘Let me buy you dinner.’ Well, not with Pat.” She stonewalled his small talk about France with an “I can’t stand the bloody frogs”.
Highsmith, who was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, had a hit with her 1950 debut, Strangers on a Train, boosted by Alfred Hitchcock’s film. A perfect second novel, lesbian road trip The Price of Salt (later republished as Carol), sold a million copies under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, and The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) was a critical success. But around the mid-1960s, Highsmith’s American luck ran out: her agent wrote that her books were “too subtle”, her characters too unlikable, to make it into paperback. By 1984 she was without an American publisher.
“She never found a home because she was so unpleasant,” Penzler says. “I don’t think anybody said, ‘Oh look, we’re losing money but I love her so much, let’s keep her.’” Not yet knowing this, he signed a six-book deal with Highsmith, creating a new imprint in the process. “Pat didn’t want to be identified as a mystery writer, so I started Penzler Books.” He knew Highsmith’s first editor, Joan Kahn. “When I told her I’d bought Pat, she said: ‘God, what’s wrong with you?’ Later we agreed she was a monster.”
In Anton Corbijn’s new film A Talent for Murder, adapted from Joanna Murray-Smith’s 2014 play, Switzerland, a dying Highsmith is played by Helen Mirren, who nails her physicality with dark contact lenses, a wig and a way of seeming to make her neck disappear. By 1995, when the film is set, Highsmith had lived alone for years, ending her last relationship with the translator Monique Buffet, then 27, when she was 66. Tortured by her sexuality, unrequited love and a poisonous mother, happiness largely eluded her.
The film’s premise is that a young American editor must persuade Highsmith to write one last Ripley novel: if she signs, his job is guaranteed and her uncertain legacy assured. It’s a fiction, of course, though lovingly built on real details, from the water glasses filled with cigarettes to her tank of pet snails and the Bond villain bunker she designed.
The image of the misanthrope has helped keep Highsmith’s legacy alive, with Ripley recently remade by Netflix, but has the knife-collecting sadist become a caricature? Did she deserve greater recognition in America? She hated publicity, which made life tricky for her champions. Penzler remembers that on one book tour, “my wife and I took her to our most beloved Italian restaurant. A young publicist, whose job it was to take Pat to all the interviews, came with two long-stemmed roses. My wife said, ‘Oh, what a sweet thing!’ Pat threw hers on the floor without making eye contact. You can’t imagine a person like this.”
After that, Penzler took on chaperoning duties. The interviews were brief and sometimes never published. “The one time Pat said something positive was when I asked if she’d like to stop for a drink. She said, ‘I would have a beer. I like beer.’” Highsmith’s Swiss editor, Anna von Planta, recalled a similar first encounter in 1984: “Pat greeted me coolly, disregarding my extended hand. She then ordered a beer and fell silent.”
By 1967, Highsmith had begun a lifelong relationship with the Swiss publisher Diogenes, who took control of her literary estate when she died – as well as 56 volumes of unpublished diaries, letters and stories, neatly filed at the back of her linen cupboard. Those diaries laid bare Highsmith’s antisemitism and racism. In her introduction to a published edition of them, in 2021, Von Planta writes that Highsmith’s views have been represented faithfully, even where offensive, but that “in a handful of more extreme instances [we did] feel it our editorial duty to deny Pat a stage for them, in the same way we did while she was still alive”. Did Penzler ever feel she crossed a line? “She hated so much, including women. If there was antisemitism in her stories, I probably missed it because it was mild compared to the other things.”
Even those who were repelled by Highsmith’s prejudices shared an appreciation of her work – its strangeness, precision, gift for character and its unfashionable darkness. The horror of the Tom Ripley novels lies not so much in their violence (though there is plenty of that), as in his increasing enjoyment of it. Does he mean to murder an art collector with a bottle of Margaux in Ripley Under Ground? “Tom simply could not answer that. And did it matter, much?”, she writes. That bleakness sold better in Europe: even a weak late novel, Found in the Street, sold 40,000 copies in Germany compared with 4,000 in America.
Gary Fisketjon was Highsmith’s next and final American editor, at Atlantic and then Knopf. He died suddenly of a stroke on 7 November, aged 72, but when I spoke to him a week earlier he had nothing but good memories of her . She was no pussycat but nor were his other authors — among them Jay McInerney, Donna Tartt and Cormac McCarthy . He still had regrets over a lunch that never quite came together with Highsmith, Bret Easton Ellis and Michel Houellebecq, which would have been quite the nihilist triumvirate: you can draw a direct line from Tom Ripley to Patrick Bateman.
“We never had a cross word,” Fisketjon said on the phone from Oregon. “I took Pat for dinner at the Odeon, which was very popular. Kind of a chic, downtown, artistic crowd and whatnot, and she was just captivated. She was studying everybody in the room.” In a 1984 diary entry, Highsmith wrote that “it will be interesting to see what good writers come from the cocaine takers”, and in the mid-80s literary scene she had her answer.
At the Frankfurt book fair, she and Fisketjon talked about their cats. “She was a superstar in Germany, and she was careful to instruct me on the best way to drink their beer, with the foam on top.” Fisketjon published Found in the Street (1987) and the final Ripley novel, Ripley Under Water (1991), giving notes in the same way he would for anyone else. “The ideal was, and this happened a few times with Pat – she’d say, ‘I see what you’re getting at, but here’s a better way of improving it.’” When Hollywood scouts took him for lunch, he told them to look at Highsmith’s backlist. “But the notion of getting in touch with a Swiss publisher to make a deal was unusual. She was an outlier, living abroad.”
Fisketjon had passed on her final novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, feeling he “couldn’t publish it as fervently as Pat deserved. She took it better than I feared.” They stayed friends, trading letters and cat news. He had seen A Talent for Murder a couple of days earlier, and liked it, while finding the plot implausible. “Dame Mirren’s expressions reminded me vividly of Pat, even if her personality was a lot darker than I ever saw.”
Liz Calder looked after Highsmith at Bloomsbury in the late 1980s until the author’s death, and gets a mention in her diaries: a dinner in Hampstead in 1992, with her “parrot called Jon-Jon – maybe 38, light green”. “Actually it was Juju,” Calder says, “but they communicated quite well. I think she was more interested in the parrot than any of us.”
Now 88, she remembers Highsmith as “very, very unusual. She would comment a lot on things around her – ‘look, something’s happening over there’ – or on what I was wearing. She was almost unsocialised.” At the same time, she had close friends in London, France and Switzerland. “People who were nothing to do with her work. She loosened up with me over time but I never met them.”
Highsmith died of lung cancer and anaemia on 4 February 1995, aged 74. The American papers ran obituaries but there was no bump in sales. When editor Robert Weil approached Diogenes about publishing a couple of her books at WW Norton in 1998, they insisted he acquire all 14 that were then out of print in America, including Strangers on a Train. “I was new at Norton. They said, ‘This is folly, the sales don’t bear up.’ But I was persistent.” He agreed to Diogenes’s terms, eventually taking on her last unpublished novel, Small g, as well as the Ripleys, Carol and dozens of unpublished stories.
Now an executive editor at the Norton imprint Liveright, Weil speaks from a New York office lined with Highsmith box sets. Actor Alden Ehrenreich spent time here while researching A Talent for Murder (“he was a wonderful fly on the wall”) and Weil thinks there is still more to be done with Highsmith. Small g was “not her best work”, but a new collection of short stories got “thundering reviews” in 2001. By then, Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley had renewed interest in her writing.
“What she could do in 12 pages was amazing,” says Weil. “Highsmith can write these stories where you feel stabbed at the end – she knows how to finish something.” He reckons there are at least five potential screenplays in a 2002 collection, Nothing That Meets the Eye, which must include A Girl Like Phyl, about a man who meets his lost love’s daughter on a plane (“The girl looked at him, happened to lift her eyes straight toward him, and Jeff felt as if he had been shot”) and the title story, about a woman who bewitches every man in a ski resort before jumping from a mountain. Highsmith follows the body all the way down, to the “dark and final click” of death.
“There are a few happy stories,” Weil adds. “There’s an evocation of New York in the late 40s which is so precise and loving. But she had a gimlet eye for hypocrisy.” Exile gave her clarity. “She learned to skin and savage America. She never left it psychologically.” In her understanding of greed, she is like Edith Wharton, Weil says. “But in terms of psychological manipulation, there are very few like Highsmith. She was so far from the mainstream, and she should have been a debutante from Dallas.”
Highsmith was rude and sometimes bigoted. She also had a capacity for friendship, and for work that would have been impossible without empathy. Both things can be true, as her favourite creation Ripley attests – beneath the good man lies an evil one; beneath her cruel exterior lay someone capable of kindness.
In March 1995 Liz Calder caught a train to Highsmith’s memorial service at the Chiesa di Tegna in Switzerland, accompanied by her UK agent Tanja Howarth. They had both found Highsmith difficult. “But we wanted to go. And it was very strange – it was well attended but not by many publishing people. Tanja and I didn’t know anybody.” The Highsmith they knew was not the one her friends mourned. She was a mystery to the last.
