The Monster Who Wrote Better Than She Lived: Patricia Highsmith Through the Eyes of Those Who Survived Her

A new film and a constellation of surviving editors, publishers, and friends reconstruct Highsmith's impossible personality — and ask whether the work outlasts the person.

Patricia Highsmith threw a publicist's roses on the floor without looking up. She stonewalled small talk about France with 'I can't stand the bloody frogs.' She greeted her Swiss editor by ignoring an extended hand and ordering a beer. This is the version of Highsmith that people who worked with her remember, and the version that Anton Corbijn's new film A Talent for Murder — Helen Mirren playing a dying Highsmith in a Bond-villain bunker, tank of snails nearby — has crystallized into something approaching myth. The myth is not entirely wrong, but it is tidier than the evidence. Otto Penzler, who signed a six-book deal with her in 1984 after Joan Kahn (Highsmith's first editor) greeted the news with 'God, what's wrong with you?', eventually agreed with Kahn that she was 'a monster.' Gary Fisketjon, her last American editor — who died on 7 November at 72, a week after speaking for this piece — remembered no cross words, watched her study a crowd at the Odeon like a naturalist, and exchanged cat updates and letters with her until the end. Both are describing the same person. The contradiction is the data. Highsmith's American publishing history is its own case study in how a country can fail its best writers by demanding they be pleasant. Her agent told her in the mid-1960s that her characters were too unlikable for paperback. By 1984 she had no American publisher. Penzler created a new imprint partly to avoid the 'mystery writer' label she hated. Robert Weil at WW Norton had to fight internal resistance in 1998 to acquire all 14 books then out of print in America, including Strangers on a Train — a novel boosted by Hitchcock, which should have been unkillable. The industry kept flinching at her, and the work kept surviving anyway. What the work has that the person apparently lacked is a ferocious, non-judgmental attention to interiority. Tom Ripley doesn't regret. He notices. 'Tom simply could not answer that. And did it matter, much?' The horror of the Ripley novels is not the body count but the operational calm. Highsmith could write this — the editors, without exception, speak to her precision, her compression, her ability to 'stab' a reader at the end of 12 pages — because she understood something clinical about how desire operates underneath social performance. The irony is that this required a kind of empathy, which is the word the article places in blunt juxtaposition to her bigotry and misanthropy. The antisemitism and racism documented in her 56 volumes of diaries (neatly filed in the linen cupboard at death, suggesting she knew their weight) are the place where the myth-making gets genuinely uncomfortable. Diogenes, her Swiss publisher since 1967, which controls her literary estate, published a 2021 edition of the diaries with Anna von Planta's introduction acknowledging that in 'a handful of more extreme instances' the editors withheld certain material — the same editorial filter, von Planta notes, that applied while Highsmith was alive. Penzler's response — that he 'probably missed' the antisemitism in her fiction because 'it was mild compared to the other things' — is either reassuring or alarming depending on your angle, but it is at least honest about the threshold problem. What survives the biography is a body of work that sold 40,000 copies of a weak late novel in Germany against 4,000 in America, that keeps generating film adaptations (Minghella's 1999 Ripley, the Netflix series, now Corbijn's film), and that Fisketjon believed had at least five unproduced screenplays still waiting in the backlist. Weil, surrounded by Highsmith box sets in his Liveright office, thinks there is still more to be done. The Alden Ehrenreich visit to research the film; the 'thundering reviews' for a 2001 short story collection; the posthumous publication of Small g — none of this looks like a writer fading. It looks like a writer whose American rehabilitation arrived twenty years late and is still catching up. The film is a fiction built on real details, and that formulation applies to the legend too. Highsmith loosened up over time with Liz Calder at Bloomsbury, had close friends in multiple countries, could talk with genuine enthusiasm about German beer technique, and was 'captivated' by a downtown New York restaurant crowd in a way that Fisketjon found moving. She was not simply a misanthrope. She was a person for whom closeness was expensive and sometimes catastrophic — a poisonous mother, a sexuality she spent her life fighting, a string of relationships that ended badly. The novels understand this better than the anecdotes do, which is probably the point.