Patricia Highsmith, the novelist who gave Tom Ripley five crimes and zero convictions

Patricia Highsmith

Photo: Open Media Ltd / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 19, 1921 Fort Worth, Texas, USA
Died	February 4, 1995 (74)
Occupation	Novelist
Awards	Edgar Allan Poe · Grand Prix de Littérature Policière · Grand Master Award, Swedish Academy of Detection · Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres · Grand Master Award, Mystery Writers of America

What makes Tom Ripley so difficult to put down — across five novels, eight film adaptations, and the 2024 Netflix series Ripley — is that readers want him to escape. Not in the way one might want a wrongly accused man to be exonerated, but in the specific, slightly shameful way one wants someone who did the thing they did to get away with it anyway. Patricia Highsmith understood this appetite before most crime writers were willing to admit it existed. She built a career on serving it without apology, and the result changed the shape of the psychological thriller for the rest of the twentieth century.

What she refused to provide was comfort. In the world of crime fiction she had inherited — the locked-room puzzles, the village detectives, the reassuring restoration of order — the murderer was caught, the logic of the universe confirmed. Highsmith found this arrangement unconvincing. Her people did terrible things and frequently prospered. The discomfort this produced was, she believed, closer to the truth of how the world actually works: the guilty are not reliably punished, the innocent are not reliably protected, and the apparatus of justice is a convention rather than a guarantee. Making this argument in popular fiction — making it entertaining, even pleasurable — was her singular achievement.

Highsmith was born as Mary Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas, on January 19, 1921, the daughter of two artists who divorced before she was born. She grew up in New York with her maternal grandmother — her mother remarried a German-American commercial artist named Stanley Highsmith, and the family lived in Greenwich Village, where Patricia adopted her stepfather’s name. The formative atmosphere was artistic, fractious, and emotionally chaotic. Her mother, Jay, was beautiful, witty, and capable of stunning cruelty toward her daughter. Highsmith spent the rest of her life maintaining a difficult, damaging correspondence with Jay while simultaneously processing the relationship through her fiction. The mothers and maternal figures in her novels tend to be absent, destructive, or both.

At Barnard College in New York, where she graduated in 1942, she studied English, Latin, and Greek — the classics track that was also the route to serious literary ambition at the time. She edited the student literary magazine, wrote poetry, and began to think of herself as a novelist. The problem, as always, was earning a living. After graduation she spent several years writing scripts for comic book series — hack work, she called it, though she was disciplined enough to recognize what it taught her about narrative compression and momentum. Short stories submitted to the New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar came back rejected; her first published story, “The Heroine,” finally appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1945, an early signal of the direction her fiction would take: a woman’s complete devotion to her employer’s children pushed past the point where devotion is supposed to stop.

The novel that changed her career arrived from an unexpected angle. On a trip to Texas, Highsmith met a man on a train who proposed an idea she could not stop thinking about: two strangers who exchange murders, each killing someone the other wants dead, eliminating the motive that would connect killer to victim. The premise became Strangers on a Train, published in 1950 — a tightly wound novel about guilt and duality that was rejected by Harper & Brothers before finding its publisher and an almost immediate second life when Alfred Hitchcock adapted it the following year. The Hitchcock film made Highsmith’s name with the general public; the novel itself remains more morally uncomfortable than the movie, its final pages refusing the clean resolution that Hollywood expected. She watched the adaptation with ambivalence: she appreciated that Hitchcock had made it a classic; she noted, with characteristic precision, that he had sanitized the ending.

While Strangers on a Train was establishing her reputation as a crime writer, she was working on a very different novel under a pseudonym. Published in 1952 as The Price of Salt — attributed to Claire Morgan — it was a love story between two women that ended not in tragedy, condemnation, or conversion, but in the couple tentatively intact and free. No mainstream publisher would take the book under her real name; the pseudonym allowed it to exist at all. The novel sold nearly a million copies within a year of publication, circulating among lesbian readers who had never seen their experience treated as the subject of hope rather than horror. Highsmith did not publicly claim authorship until 1990, when it was reissued under its new title, Carol. The reason she gave for the long delay: she had not wanted to be categorized as a lesbian writer. The more precise reason was that she understood the label would cost her critical standing in an era that used it dismissively — and she had worked too hard for the standing to surrender it cheaply. Todd Haynes’s 2015 film adaptation, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, finally brought the novel the cultural visibility its quality had always deserved, earning six Oscar nominations and establishing it as a touchstone of queer cinema.

The character who would define her reputation arrived three years later. Tom Ripley, introduced in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), is a young American in New York — aimless, intelligent, slightly desperate, deeply in love with the idea of being someone else. He is sent to Italy to retrieve a rich man’s son from a life of elegant idleness. He kills the man. Then he kills a witness. Then he reinvents himself as his victim, navigating Italian society with a forger’s grace and a con man’s nerve. The novel ends with him in possession of the dead man’s life and apparently safe — not because the authorities are incompetent, but because Highsmith is not interested in justice as a satisfying narrative endpoint. Her interest is in the texture of guilt as Ripley experiences it: not remorse, exactly, but a heightened vigilance that feels, in his more honest moments, almost like pleasure. Graham Greene, who championed her work in Britain when it was still finding its readership, called her “the poet of apprehension.” He was right about the apprehension. He may have been too mild about the pleasure.

The Ripley series extended across five novels, the last published in 1991. Across Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley Under Water (1991), the character evolved from the tightly wound impersonator of the first book into something more languorous and dangerously settled. By the later novels, Ripley is a bourgeois homeowner in rural France, married, comfortable, and still killing when sufficiently provoked. The social comedy grows more pointed: Highsmith is skewering the pretensions of European upper-middle-class life even as she is living within it. The impunity that seemed audacious in 1955 has become, by 1991, simply the condition of Ripley’s existence — not a triumph but a habitation. He has made himself at home in a world that should have expelled him, and Highsmith makes this feel less like a fantasy than a diagnosis.

The Ripley novels are the most famous strand of a much larger body of work. Deep Water (1957) traces the slow psychological unraveling of a husband who commits murder to keep a marriage together and finds that the marriage was not worth keeping. The Two Faces of January (1964) sets two men against each other in the ruins of a European vacation, each holding something the other needs and neither willing to release it. The Glass Cell (1964) follows a man through imprisonment and out the other side, transformed in ways he did not choose and cannot fully account for. Each of these novels demonstrates the breadth of her obsessions beyond the single famous character: the same moral universe, differently configured, with the same patient, merciless attention to the internal logic of a mind that has done something it cannot undo.

Her craft manual, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, published in 1966 and revised in 1981, reveals as much about her method as any of her novels. She describes her approach as beginning with the criminal — understanding the rationale, the self-deception, the specific shape of the desire that precedes the crime — before constructing the plot around that psychological core. What she calls suspense is closer to what contemporary literary criticism calls interiority: the state of being inside a consciousness that knows something the reader knows too, a shared awareness of danger or guilt that tightens across the length of the novel. She explicitly rejected the detective-novel model in which the reader’s pleasure is intellectual — a puzzle to be solved, an order to be restored. Highsmith’s pleasure is moral, almost physical: the discomfort of sympathy extended to someone who has done something terrible, the impossibility of withdrawing that sympathy once it has been given.

She moved to Europe in 1949 and never permanently returned to the United States. The practical reasons she gave — cheaper to live, easier to write — were real but incomplete. America’s treatment of gay people in the postwar decades, the literary culture’s indifference to her kind of fiction, and a deep personal difficulty with the social demands of her home country all played their parts. In Europe she found the landscape she had been looking for: Italy for the settings of the Ripley novels, France for her cultural reference points, Switzerland for the solitude she needed. She eventually settled in the village of Aurigeno above Locarno, where she worked alone and kept dozens of snails as companions — she traveled with them in a lettuce-filled hatbox, having concluded, not entirely as a joke, that she preferred their company to most people’s.

The posthumous publication of Highsmith’s diaries — released in edited form in 2021 as Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941–1995, drawn from eight thousand pages of private notebooks — produced a reckoning that continues. The volumes revealed a woman of extraordinary intelligence and frank misanthropy, and contained passages of antisemitism explicit enough that critics and publishers were forced to confront the distance between the work they admired and the person who wrote it. Highsmith’s defenders argue that the diaries represent the private pathology of a deeply alienated individual rather than the views embedded in the fiction. This argument is not quite convincing and not quite wrong. Her novels do not endorse antisemitism; they do, consistently, construct social and moral worlds in which the most capable, most winning figure operates outside conventional morality — a construction that rewards scrutiny rather than simply disavowal. The diaries make Highsmith harder to love. They do not make her work less important.

What Highsmith could not have anticipated was how thoroughly her novels would become the raw material for cinema. The adaptations began with Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and multiplied: René Clément’s Purple Noon (1960), with Alain Delon as Ripley in a French-language adaptation that Highsmith considered superior to the later Hollywood version; Wim Wenders’s The American Friend (1977), which relocated Ripley’s Game to the criminal underworld of Hamburg; Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), with Matt Damon and Jude Law; Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game (2002), with John Malkovich delivering what many critics consider the most accurate screen version of the character — cold, faintly comic, oddly at peace with what he has made of himself. Each adaptation found something different to amplify because the source material is capacious enough to sustain multiple readings without being exhausted by any of them.

The 2024 Netflix series Ripley, written and directed by Steven Zaillian across eight episodes with Andrew Scott in the title role, won four Emmy Awards including Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series. Shot in black and white across Italian locations, it is the most faithful of the Ripley adaptations in at least one important sense: it makes the character genuinely frightening rather than charming. Scott’s performance strips away the social ease that earlier actors brought to the role and exposes the machinery underneath — the constant recalculation, the effort of maintaining a fictional self that has displaced the original one, the exhaustion that never quite shows on the face. The series is also the most Highsmithian in its pacing: slow, meticulous, interested in the visual texture of the Italian landscape in a way that mirrors how Highsmith herself wrote European settings, with precise and accumulating detail that makes the beauty feel threatening.

Her personal life was a consistent source of material and unhappiness in roughly equal measure. She was lesbian, and her loves were intense, complicated, and largely unsuccessful in duration: Carol Plant in the 1940s, Ellen Blumenthal Hill in the early 1950s, the writer Marijane Meaker (M.E. Kerr) during a two-year period in the mid-1960s, and Caroline Besterman — a relationship that spanned decades in its on-and-off configurations. She was not an easy person to love. Her diary entries about her partners were sometimes vicious; she left relationships precipitously when infatuation gave way to the familiarity she found unbearable. Her alcoholism was both a tool of the writing life and a serious condition that damaged her health over decades. She cared fiercely about animal welfare and was an ardent opponent of organized religion. She left the bulk of her estate to the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York — the institution where she had done some of her earliest serious writing.

Highsmith died on February 4, 1995, at a hospital in Locarno, Switzerland, from aplastic anemia and lung cancer, at the age of seventy-four. The recognition she received in her lifetime was disproportionately European: the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière from France in 1957, the Grand Master Award from the Swedish Academy of Detection in 1979, and the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture in 1990. The Anglo-American literary establishment was slower to acknowledge her; the Mystery Writers of America named her a Grand Master only in 2009, fourteen years after her death. By then, the critical reevaluation was well underway. Ruth Rendell, Donna Tartt, Gillian Flynn, and Tana French had all named her as a primary influence — specifically the quality she had mastered of placing the reader inside a criminal’s perspective without the narrative distance that turns understanding into judgment.

Tom Ripley, in particular, established the template for the brilliant, amoral antihero who would populate prestige fiction and television for the following seven decades: the ancestor of Walter White, of Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, of every character in every story where the audience is invited to root for someone they should be horrified by. Highsmith’s formal contribution was demonstrating that this sympathy could be sustained, deepened, and made increasingly uncomfortable across hundreds of pages — that the reader’s unease was a feature, not a failure, of the experience she was engineering. The 2024 Netflix series, and the conversation it reignited about what it means to follow a killer with pleasure, is one more instance of a process that has been ongoing for seventy years. Highsmith’s account of the human capacity for moral self-deception was thorough enough to survive every new cultural context it gets applied to. It will survive several more.