Because she could never hold on to happiness, Highsmith subsumed it in her work, always her best and most lasting love. She was a lesbian who identified more with men an ardent pursuer of pleasure, especially in her youth (which emerges more wholly in a new documentary, “Loving Highsmith”) a devotee of cats and snails a raging antisemite and a longtime expat still deeply and identifiably American. So what is it about Patricia Highsmith that keeps us reading? I’ll answer strictly for myself: Her concepts are daring, her portrayals of men in the throes of personality disorder and psychopathic leanings are equally repulsive and propulsive, and there is enough sublimated autobiography in her work that searching out the facts of her life reveals all manner of infuriating contradictions. (Another Highsmith biography, released in 2003, Andrew Wilson’s “Beautiful Shadow,” is also worth seeking out, though I’d skip Richard Bradford’s 2021 effort, “Devils, Lusts, and Strange Desires.”) Schenkar, who died in 2021, made Highsmith seem so relentlessly complicated, maddening and fascinating that I had to know how that specific mind produced her books. What finally opened the trapdoor was Joan Schenkar’s nonlinear, idiosyncratic biography, “ The Talented Miss Highsmith” (2009).

Bleak worldviews weren’t the issue perhaps it was the unconscious feeling that spending too much time in Highsmith’s brain might alter mine irrevocably. Though I have been a reader of crime fiction all of my adult life, I avoided the work of Patricia Highsmith (1921-95) until my early 30s.

The price of salt 1952