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'Highsmith writes about men like a spider writing about flies' Observer 'An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there's nothing quite like it' Boston Globe 'The outstanding merit of Deep Water is the dexterity with which it develops the psychopath's portrait from the first faint agreeable outline to the full dark horrific colours of schizophrenia. If you read crime stories at all, or perhaps especially if you don't, you should read Deep Water' Sunday Times
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Melinda Van Allen is beautiful, rebellious, tempestuous and sexy. And unfortunately for wealthy socialite Vic Van Allen, she is his wife. An incorrigible flirt, Melinda spares no opportunity to flaunt her many lovers to her husband. In response, Vic doesn't miss an opportunity to let them know that he's the jealous type. When Malcolm McCrae, one of Melinda's exes, is murdered in the city, Vic doesn't hesitate to suggest to her latest paramour that he might have been responsible. But as rumours about Vic's nasty streak begin to spread amongst their friends, fiction and reality begin to converge. And it's only a matter of time before Vic really does have blood on his hands.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
As good as the Ripley novels.,
This review is from: Deep Water (Paperback)
If your only experience of Patricia Highsmith is the Ripley novels, and you're looking for more, you should definitely pick up this book. Deep Water was her first novel after 'The Talented Mr Ripley', and is a similar suspensful and psychological study of murder. I'm about three quarters of the way through Highsmith's books, and this is my new favourite.The classic Highsmith ingredients are there: the finely observed, almost mundane domestic setting (which feels like a social history of 1950s US middle class life); the matter of fact, and therefore profoundly shocking way her killer switches between domestic routine, murder and back again; the stupidity/complicity of small town neighbours, and so on. The final few chapters also provide some fine moments of suspense: we know something's going to happen, we know where it's going to happen, we know who it's going to happen to, but we don't know exactly how it is going to unfold. So get this one, and then move on to 'Cry of the Owl', 'The Blunderer' and 'Edith's Diary'.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
High and Low,
By John Self "www.theasylum.wordpress.com" (Belfast, NI) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Deep Water (Paperback)
As with her better known Ripley novels, in Deep Water (a welcome reissue from Bloomsbury in a handsome edition), Patricia Highsmith gives us a portrayal of a killer who is not entirely unsympathetic: or at least (as with Tom Ripley), it seems to the reader that the people who suffer at his hand are a lot worse than he is... Here, she sets Victor Van Allen, a small publisher with an independent income, against his vampish wife Melinda, or, as the blurb puts it:"Melinda Van Allen is beautiful, rebellious, tempestuous and sexy. Unfortunately for wealthy socialite Vic Van Allen, she is his wife." When one of Melinda's lovers is murdered, Van Allen seizes the opportunity to frighten off another by telling him that he, Van Allen, was the murderer. No-one believes him, but word gets around, and soon enough, Van Allen finds himself the true possessor of the title. The transition from wronged husband to killer seems to us logical, fluent and plausible, and our sympathy is, if not unequivocally with Van Allen, certainly never with the victims (though Highsmith dextrously forces this by never delving into the reactions of those left behind: the other victims of any murder). She is more interested in exploring what makes a man do these things, and in interesting us in it too, by making the books so devourably readable. "She writes about men like a spider writing about flies," said one critic, and it's a sticky, addictive web once you're in.
5.0 out of 5 stars
An everyday psychopath,
By
This review is from: Deep Water (Paperback)
I can never decide which Highsmith novel I like best, because objectively they're all about as good as each other. But Deep Water is one which tends to crop up in my mind when the question is posed. It's a beautifully controlled story, light on action but strong on suspense. What I love about Highsmith's gallery of haunted, haunting men is how similar yet different they are. All are capable of charm, or at least slipping below the radar, a lot have steady, well-paid jobs, live comfortably, and on the surface lead respectable lives. They're well-dressed, handsome, literate chaps. But if I was to stand Victor Van Allen, anti-hero of Deep Water, beside the author's recurrant and most famous character Tom Ripley, they'd be easily distinguishable from each other, so precise are Highsmith's portraits.
Victor Van Allen is a small-town intellectual married to a whore; namely, the drunken, boisterous socialite Melinda, who with Victor's unspoken consent entertains a string of lovers at their home. One night, however, for no very explicable reason, Victor snaps and with calm premeditation murders her latest beau, Malcolm McRae. Melinda cottons on to what her husband has done - more through her stubborn instinct than logical reasoning - and the rest of the novel follows Victor as he keeps narrowly evading exposure. Why did Victor kill Malcolm? We never really know, perhaps because Victor himself doesn't know. Through her typical objective, third-person narration Highsmith lets us follow his thoughts - at no point do we feel the author's keeping things from us - but though we come away with a clear vision of who Victor is, his motives remain elusive. And that's how it should be. Victor isn't Buffalo Bill, a serial killer on the run from a profiler who can trace his madness to a bad childhood. He's an everyman, with everyday interests and ambitions, who happens to be a monster. This is what makes Highsmith one of the darkest writers who ever lived, and certainly the darkest crime writer. She isn't a moralist or magician. Unlike her influence Dostoyevsky she doesn't teach you anything about the soul or redemption, her characters mostly lack the former and are beyond the latter, but she also doesn't knit clever puzzles, a la Agatha Christie. No Poriots or Columbos exist in her world. She's a painter of personalities, one who anlyses the darkness and derangement which lives, for the most part, unobtrusively among us. If her work has any message, it's simply that evil isn't always explicable.
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