Jill Dawson wins the runner-up in the New Angle Prize for her novel The Crime Writer, and wins £500. The judges enjoyed “a destabilising book in which you’re never quite sure what’s real, imagined, or simply the result of madness”. More details here. Continue reading…
The Crime Writer won both the novel section of the East Anglian Book Awards and overall Book of the Year More details here. Continue reading…
‘The Crime Writer, then, works as its own double agent, in a fond nod to Highsmith’s partiality to the identity switch. One reading finds a straightforward suspense story stacked with deliciously unlikeable people and rife with period detail; another offers a fascinating fictive stroll into the mind of a writer who veers off the path… Continue reading…
‘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…