Saturday, September 12, 2015

My hero / Patricia Highsmith by Peter Swanson

Patricia Highsmith
Poster by T.A.

My hero: 

Patricia Highsmith by Peter Swanson



Highsmith’s thrillers produce an almost queasy feeling – the desire to look away – while being too fascinating and compelling to put down

BIOGRAPHY OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

Peter Swanson
Saturday 12 Sep 2015

I
first read Patricia Highsmith while in college, starting with Strangers on a Train. I’d seen Alfred Hitchcock’s film version, so I knew the plot, but I wasn’t prepared for the novel’s sticky atmosphere of guilt and corruption. Hitchcock managed to capture some of it, but he was only skimming the surface of a very murky pond. Highsmith takes her readers right into the muck. Reading it produced an almost queasy feeling – the desire to look away – yet I was compelled to keep turning the pages. That’s not an easy trick, especially for an author’s first book, and that is why Highsmith is my literary hero.

Her crime of choice was murder, but she wasn’t interested in low-rent criminals and gangsters. The murders in Highsmith country are committed, often almost accidentally, by everyday sociopaths, men with masks who find themselves drowning a wife’s lover in a swimming pool, say, just because the opportunity presents itself. This particular act happens in one of her best books, Deep Water, a chilly portrayal of a dysfunctional marriage. What makes it fascinating is not just the horror of the crimes, but the good-natured normality of their perpetrator.
Patricia Highsmith

Brilliant plotting was only one of the things Highsmith did well. She had an economical prose style that was never flashy and never boring. And her characters, especially her male ones, are familiar and alien at the same time. Vic Van Allen, the mild-mannered murderer of Deep Water, keeps snails as pets, as did Highsmith herself. He gets an almost meditative pleasure from watching them mate.
Highsmith, by some accounts, was not a pleasant person. Like the snails she loved, she had a hard exterior, and there is a biography by Joan Schenkar that chronicles the slime Highsmith left in her wake (although her conclusions have been challenged). But she also left behind a treasure trove of great thrillers, most of which do what all great thrillers do: take you on a ride you’re not sure you want to be on, but that you can’t get off.

• Peter Swanson’s The Kind Worth Killing is out in paperback from Faber.




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016

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