Patricia Highsmith has been praised by Graham Greene in the good old way as 'a writer who has created a world of her own'. She can be even better than that - when she takes a world and makes it not only her own but ours. She lurks in the murk where you have to peer to check if this is an - or the - underworld. In her seething city-settings, paranoia may be the saving of you, and yet paranoia does have, too, a hideously masochistic alluring power. She is the poet of these death-bearing pheromones of fear.

LRB 7 August 1986 | PDF Download