‘Jill Dawson’s The Crime Writer has Patricia Highsmith as its heroine: it’s inspired by the years that the thriller writer spent in Suffolk in the early 1960s, and is fantastically moody and appealingly unhinged – a piece of sophisticated literary ventriloquism that achieves a wonderful blurring of the lines between fact and fantasy.’ Continue reading…
MAIL ONLINE Rating: ***** When writers die, their popularity often dies with them. Does anyone read John Fowles or Anthony Burgess or Norman Mailer any more? In the case of their contemporary Patricia Highsmith, the reverse is true. When she died in 1995, she didn’t even have an American publisher. But 21 years on, she… Continue reading…
The title of Orange Prize-shortlisted Jill Dawson’s novel (The Crime Writer) should be taken with a pinch of salt: its subject, Patricia Highsmith, considered herself to be a writer not of crime but suspense fiction: less Agatha Christie, more Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Highsmith’s 1960s sojourn in the quiet Suffolk village of Earl Soham provides the inspiration… Continue reading…
Jake Kerridge enjoys a novel that imagines Patricia Highsmith had dabbled in crime herself Patricia Highsmith died more than 20 years ago, but Jill Dawson’s The Crime Writer is, surprisingly, the first novel to take as its subject that rebarbative, whisky-soaked genius, who liked to take her pet snails to parties in her handbag and… Continue reading…
Dawson can be applauded for her passionate immersion in her subject, and for creating a novel as dark and odd as the subject herself. In an era that favours dark suspense and unhealthy passions, a novel about Patricia Highsmith could hardly be more timely. Published a few months after the release of the acclaimed Highsmith adaptation Carol, Jill Dawson’s The… Continue reading…
I was initially aware of Patricia Highsmith, as most non-fans probably are, as the author of The Talented Mr Ripley – and that only because I’d seen the film, not read the book. Then a couple of years ago I read Deep Water for an online book club and was instantly hooked…and astounded. How had I not realised what… Continue reading…
Pat is a haunted woman. “Something pursued her. Dreams – phantoms – woke her in the small hours, driving her from her bed to walk in the darkness of the strange English village.” Sequestered in Earl Soham, drinking too much whisky and brooding over her relationship with cool, elegant but married Sam, Pat is starting… Continue reading…
Having myself published a novel called The Mystery Writer, I felt a frisson of fellowship on receiving The Crime Writer, the more so on realising that Dawson’s book, like mine, mixes historical fact with fiction. The main character in Dawson’s book is based on the notoriously gay, notoriously sinister crime writer Patricia Highsmith. The action… Continue reading…
Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection of them in her handbag, who abandoned her native America for a restless life in Europe, and who turned a habitual paranoia into literature. Now, 20 years after her death, her reputation has been substantially… Continue reading…
Dawson often draws on real people for inspiration in her novels, and this one is no exception. Here, she takes the fascinating character of the legendary crime novelist Patricia Highsmith as both a subject for biographical scrutiny and the protagonist of an imagined story, in which Highsmith crosses the line between writing about murderers and… Continue reading…