Guest Post - Andrew Wilson

Andrew Wilson first came to my attention as the author of an admirable biography of Patricia Highsmith. More recently, he's established himself as a popular author of crime novels starring Agatha Christie. He has a new book out - the paperback appeared on the same day as the hardback of Mortmain Hall, and like me he's keen to make sure that the absence of a launch and supporting events don't mean that the book disappears without trace. I'm sure it won't and I'm delighted to host this guest post about the two female crime writers in his life:

"The two writers stand at the opposite ends of the crime writing spectrum. Christie, still the world’s bestselling novelist, is known for her cosy reads, murder mysteries which often end with the death, suicide or arrest of the murderer. Highsmith, meanwhile, is famous for her creation of Tom Ripley, the psychopath who charms and beguiles the reader into identifying with him and who repeatedly gets away with murder.

Christie started writing crime during the First World War, a time when the world needed the comforts that could be supplied by the reassuring form of the whodunit. “The enemy was wicked, the hero was good: it was as crude and as simple as that,” Agatha wrote in her autobiography. “I was, like everyone else who wrote books or read them, against the criminal and for the innocent victim.”

Contrast this with what Highsmith noted in her diary, as she was penning The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955. “What I predicted I would once do, I am doing already in this very book (Tom Ripley), that is, showing the unequivocal triumph of evil over good, and thus rejoicing in it. I shall make my readers rejoice in it, too.”

The two women were born decades and continents apart; indeed their backgrounds could not be more different. Christie, raised in an upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon in 1890, had an idyllic childhood. Highsmith, however, born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, said she was “born under a sickly star”.  Mary, her mother, attempted to abort her by drinking turpentine; when the termination proved unsuccessful her parents divorced. Then, when Highsmith was four or five years old, it seems that she was sexually abused by two strangers at her grandmother’s house in Fort Worth. She grew up with such a loathing of her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, that she dreamt of murdering him. “I learned to live with a grievous hatred very early on,” she said. “And learned to stifle also my more positive emotions. All this probably caused my propensity to write bloodthirsty stories of murder and violence.”

In Christie’s autobiography, published a year after the author’s death in 1976, the writer analysed how crime writing had changed over the course of the twentieth century. She remembers being shocked by the character of Raffles, the gentleman burglar created by E.W. Hornung, whose brother-in-law Conan Doyle had told him, “You must not make the criminal a hero.” 

For her part, Highsmith loathed what she perceived as the cozy, nostalgic world of novelists such as Christie, whose books she regarded as nothing more than a kind of animated algebra. “I think it is a silly way of teasing people, who-done-it,” she said of the detective novel. “It is like a puzzle, and puzzles do not interest me.” 

When I began my series of novels with Agatha Christie as sleuth I wondered whether it would be possible to draw on these two very different traditions. The first in the series, A Talent for Murder, is a fictionalised account of Christie’s real-life disappearance in 1926. In that novel, Agatha is being blackmailed by a sinister GP, Dr Kurs, who wants her to commit a murder on his behalf, an idea which Highsmith explored in her debut Strangers on a Train. “You, Mrs Christie, are going to commit a murder,” Dr Kurs says to Agatha. “But before then you’re going to disappear.”

During the course of the novel Agatha is also manipulated by another man, John Davison, of the British Secret Intelligence Service, who recognises Christie’s potential talent as an agent. If A Talent for Murder deals with Agatha’s recruitment into the SIS — she suffers in a way that makes it emotionally necessary for her to join forces with Davison — then the rest of the series focuses on how she uses her skills as an expert plotter of fiction in solving crimes. And although these are classic Christie-inspired whodunits — a form which is undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment — I hope I’ve invested them with just the right amount of Highsmithian darkness too." 

• Death in a Desert Land is the third in Andrew Wilson's Agatha Christie adventures and is published in paperback on 2 April (Simon & Schuster, £8.99). The other novels are A Talent for Murder and A Different Kind of Evil. The fourth book in the series, I Saw Him Die, is published in hardback in August. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith is published by Bloomsbury.

Beautiful Shadow by Andrew Wilson

Beautiful Shadow is a very good title for any book, and it's very suitable on several levels for a biography of Patricia Highsmith. Andrew Wilson's book was first published in 2003 and it's been on my shelves ever since. I pored over it from cover to cover in preparation for the Highsmith panel at Harrogate. And it was a fascinating, if lengthy, read.

Highsmith's life was remarkable, and in some ways very sad. She had a deeply troubled family background, which set the pattern for a complex and often unsatisfactory personal life. She had many relationships with other women, and a startling number of people in her life either committed suicide or attempted to do so. Perhaps this tells us something about those to whom she was drawn, but the overall impression I had was one of sadness, that such a gifted woman should have led an existence that was often so melancholy.

She didn't help herself, it seems fair to say. In her youth, she was lovely to look at, and this is the only biography of a crime novelist that I've ever read which includes a nude photograph of its subject. This is, some might say, not something that should be encouraged! Be that as it may, what is startling is her evident physical deterioration within a relatively short time. She drank far too much, and didn't look after her health. As a result, she was plagued with health problems, and I feel sure that these must have affected the quality of some of her later writing. A terrible shame.

Highsmith plainly had several unappealing characteristics, not least a tendency towards racism, but she also had a (very dark) sense of humour,and this shows up often in her fiction; it's a quality of hers that seems to me to be under-estimated. Perhaps suffering and unhappiness helped to make her a great writer - and that's what I think she is. Wilson does, in my opinion, a good job in presented a rounded portrait of a complex woman, and makes excellent use of the private papers to which he had access.

Beautiful Shadow

The experience of listening to the Ripley Mysteries on CD sent me hurrying back to Andrew Wilson’s exhaustive biography of Ripley’s creator, Patricia Highsmith. Beautiful Shadow was first published six years ago.and it is a diligently researched and most capably written study of a writer who intrigued yet perplexed Wilson, as she did most of the people she met – as well as many of her readers.

Wilson is an experienced journalist, but this was his first book. It’s quite an achievement, and benefits from very extensive research. Wilson draws on Highsmith’s very extensive archive of unpublished personal papers, as well as on frank interviews with many close friends, to paint a portrait of a woman who, for all the richness of her life experiences, seems to have suffered a great deal of unhappiness. Wilson charts her often troubled sex life, her various health problems, and her curious upbringing - as well as her obsession with snails.

All that the book lacks, for my money, is a real sense of Highsmith’s place in literary history, and an assessment of her contribution to the development of the crime genre. She possessed a remarkable talent, which is shown not only in the Ripley books and Strangers on a Train, but also in that splendid study of a murderer, Deep Water. I believe her influence can be seen in the work of notable contemporary writers such as Ruth Rendell, but Wilson doesn’t explore this. He is to be congratulated, though, for having written an important book about a major novelist.

One unique feature of the book also deserves a quick mention. This is the only biography of a woman crime writer that I’ve read that includes a topless photo of the subject. You wouldn’t find anything similar in a book about Christie or Sayers, that’s for sure. The picture, taken when Highsmith was about 21, shows an attractive young woman, which makes it all the more sad when Wilson relates that, in her later years, Highsmith’s plainness of appearance came in for comment. Time didn’t treat her kindly, but it should do no harm to her literary reputation, which in the case of such a remarkable writer really ought to be assured.

The Boy Who Followed Ripley

The Boy who Followed Ripley, fourth in Patricia Highsmith’s series, makes for very good CD listening. I felt it was a distinct improvement on Ripley’s Game. In this story, a young American lad who claims to be 18 but looks a couple of years younger approaches Ripley, and it soon becomes clear both that he has (for some mysterious reason) sought Ripley out, and also that the pair are very much on the same wavelength, psychologically and emotionally (because Ripley, for all his conscience deficit, can certainly be an emotional chap in certain circumstances.)

The truth about the boy’s identity, and his past, soon emerges. Despite the terrible nature of the boy’s revelations, Ripley is strongly attracted to him, and installs him in the house he shares with his rich and glamorous wife, nominally to help with the gardening.

The gay subtext of the earlier Ripley stories is much closer to the surface of this one, and plays a more important part in the development of the plot. There is extensive discussion of Highsmith's gay writing in Andrew Wilson's important biography of her, Beautiful Shadow, which will be the subject of a future post.