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…