How does such plain writing come with such powerful insights into dark corridors of the human mind? In this, the era of the too-long literary novel, so many writers could learn from her – and the good news is that Virago has recently reissued The Glass Cell, and all the other titles I’ve mentioned, as Modern Classics. Vic and Melinda Van Allen's loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby, in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as. As it says on the jacket of my Fireside edition, its opening scene – in a state penitentiary, a man is strung up by his thumbs – is “almost unacceptable”, which is 1964-speak for: this may upset you, but you’ll also be in its power, unable to do anything but read on. In Deep Water, set in the quiet, small town of Little Wesley, Patricia Highsmith has created a vicious and suspenseful tale of love gone sour. But The Glass Cell, a tale of wrongful imprisonment, really is a masterwork: Crime and Punishment without any hard labour on the part of the reader. Among the books of hers I like best are Deep Water from 1957 (jealous husband tries to win back his wife by boasting of murder) and Edith’s Diary from 1977 (abandoned wife’s fantasy life grows ever more weirdly unhealthy).

Thanks to Todd Haynes’s forthcoming movie of Carol – aka The Price of Salt, her lesbian love story of 1952 – Highsmith is about to have another moment, and one that will, moreover, remind readers there’s more to her than Tom Ripley. Writing under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, Highsmith published the first lesbian novel with a happy ending, The Price of Salt, in 1952, republished 38 years later as Carol under her own name and later adapted into a 2015 film.Down the years, I found a lot of treasure at the Fireside Bookshop, including a first edition of Patricia Highsmith’s 1964 novel The Glass Cell. Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas briefly found love on the set of Deep Water, the 2022 film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel about a mysterious married couple. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, has been adapted for stage and screen, the best known being the Alfred Hitchcock film released in 1951.

She was dubbed 'the poet of apprehension' by novelist Graham Greene. Her writing derived influence from existentialist literature, and questioned notions of identity and popular morality. She wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories throughout her career spanning nearly five decades, and her work has led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Patricia Highsmith (Janu– February 4, 1995) was an American novelist and short story writer widely known for her psychological thrillers, including her series of five novels featuring the character Tom Ripley.

Deep water novel patricia highsmith