Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (Hardcover)

The writer Patricia Highsmith prevented several attempts at a biography during her lifetime and was extremely unwilling to talk about herself or her writing, yet she left numerous frank and analytical diaries, notebooks and journals which have been used extensively in what is, therefore, a first biography. Wilson has also interviewed (often for the first time) many of the women who were her lovers or who inspired her in some way, as well as Highsmith's friends and colleagues. The information he has gathered has been put together to good effect to throw fascinating light both on Highsmith's often tormented personal life and her approach to her writing. A lesbian whose sometimes promiscuous love life brought her little happiness, Highsmith was often monosyllabic with other people and preferred the company of her adored cats - or even, when she was living in Suffolk, snails, which she carried around with some lettuce in a capacious handbag! As a prolific writer of 'noir' stories, she specialised in psychological insight into what drives a person to crime and is perhaps best known for the amoral Tom Ripley, who featured in several of her books, and Strangers on a Train, in which the psychopathic Bruno manipulates a weaker man and double murder is committed. From an early age she was intrigued by abnormal behaviour; together with her reactions to events or experiences, she would explore new ideas by putting them into print. Her bleak view of the world meant that until recently she was neglected in her home country, America; in the Europe of Sartre and of Camus's alienated heroes she has long had a following. Andrew Wilson's detailed and sympathetic biography of this strange and contradictory writer should encourage readers new and old to seek out her books. (Kirkus UK)

A closely drawn portrait of the writer who "celebrated irrationality, chaos and emotional anarchy, and regarded the criminal as the perfect example of the twentieth-century existentialist hero." British journalist Wilson uses Highsmith's diaries, notebooks, letters, and interviews to catch (in her own words) her "moods, fits, and daily activities." Perhaps best known for Strangers on a Train and her Ripley novels, Highsmith (1921-95) was never easy on her readers, says Wilson. Her work was often macabre and transgressive, noir and existential, drawing upon evil's banality and life's strange forces ("Each person carries around in himself a terrible other world of hell and the unknown," she wrote in her notebook). Highsmith herself comes across as a distinctive character: she was reserved ("This is the tragedy of the conscience-stricken young homosexual, that he not only conceals his sex objectives, but conceals his humanity and natural warmth of heart as well," she wrote, though she later became comfortable with her lesbianism); footloose; bereft of moral certainties ("I myself have a criminal bent. . . . I have a lurking liking for those who flout the law which I realise is despicable of me"); maybe even, as a friend noted, possessing "a form of high-functioning Asperger's Syndrome." Her relationships were many and urgent, and she had a quirky enough character to provide diverting stories, like the one of smuggling pet snails into France by hiding them under her breasts. But it's the dark side that most fascinates Wilson, the warped perspectives of Highsmith's central characters, their attractions and antagonisms, and her desire "to explore the diseases produced by sexual repression . . . like peculiar vermin in a stagnant well." Perhaps no one "can document a life in all its richness," but Wilson has come close, getting at Highsmith from a number of angles and showing the splinters of identity in his subject that she herself found so captivating. (Two 8-page b&w photo inserts, not seen) (Kirkus Reviews)

‘Excellent and outstandingly readable … Brilliant and compelling’ --This text refers to the Paperback edition.