Deep Water - 2022 film review

I read Deep Water during my first 'Patricia Highsmith phase', many moons ago. The novel was published in 1957, when she was arguably at the height of her powers as a novelist. The plot struck me as nothing special, but the presentation of character and situation impressed me. It isn't her best book, but it's a very good one. So naturally I was keen to see what Adrian Lyne's recent film version would be like.

He decided, reasonably enough, to update the story. So Vic Van Allen (Ben Affleck) is now a man who has made a fortune out of developing guidance chips for use in combat drones. Although still young, he has settled to affluent retirement together with his sexy wife Melinda (Ana de Armas) and young daughter. But Vic is moody and Melinda flirtatious and it soon becomes clear that all is not well between them.

Vic is jealous of her flings with other men and he warns off one lover by claiming to have murdered a man that Melinda had an affair with. Is he telling the truth? Probably not, but it's not entirely clear, and there's little doubt that Vic is a man on the edge. Violence isn't far away and Melinda's provocative behaviour causes his behaviour to become increasingly irrational. An older man, a rather annoying writer called Don, become suspicious of Vic and the conditions are created for a deadly confrontation.

The main problem with the film is its lack of pace, the result of a script which seems less than assured and is over-long. Affleck and de Armas do their best with the material, but more could have been done by the writers to make the psychosexual undercurrents in their relationship more compelling. It's not a terrible movie, but it could and should have been so much better.   

Forgotten Book - Gold Was Our Grave

Gold Was Our Grave ranks as one of Henry Wade's more obscure titles. It was published in 1954, at a time when his reputation as one of the most accomplished practitioners of Golden Age detection was fading, and it has never attracted any significant critical discussion. But it features his main detective character, the likeable, hard-working, and occasionally fallible John Poole of  Scotland Yard, and boasts several of the attributes that made Wade well worth reading.

The book appeared at a time when the likes of Patricia Highsmith and Margaret Millar on the other side of the Atlantic, and Margot Bennett, Shelley Smith, Julian Symons, and John Bingham in the UK, were remaking the crime novel. Their books didn't, for instance, tend to include maps of the crime scene in the classic tradition - but Wade's novel does, with a drawing of the relevant part of Lincoln's Inn Fields. It's a small point, but it illustrates that he was working in a vein that was no longer fashionable.

The early pages of the story give us a rather plodding (although relevant) account of a fraud trial involving a South American gold mine. None of the alleged fraudsters was convicted and now, it seems, someone is out to take a rather belated revenge. The prime mover in the gold mine fiasco is now a successful businessman and appears to be the victim of an attempted murder. But he doesn't want police protection - will this prove to be a fatal mistake?

There are plenty of classic touches here, as well as a couple of digs, characteristic of Wade, at the pernicious nature of British taxation policy in the post-war era. The plot twist is a variant of one used to brilliant effect by Agatha Christie in the 30s, the detective work is in the Freeman Wills Crofts manner, and the cynical attitude at the end of the book towards the legal system and the nature of justice is worthy of Anthony Berkeley. This is a rather wordy novel, and it could and perhaps should have been pared down considerably. But it's decent entertainment, a book that doesn't deserve to have been so widely overlooked.

Forgotten Book - A Penknife in My Heart

Nicholas Blake's A Penknife in My Heart, first published in 1958, is highly readable, but in some ways a curious book. It's very well-written on the whole, as you would expect from this author, yet there's something slightly amateurish about the way he jumps from one viewpoint to another in a single scene, and in the way he tends to "tell" rather than "show". I suspect this may have been because he did not put as much effort into his novel writing as he did into his poetry published under his real name, Cecil Day Lewis.

Another oddity is that the central situation, of an exchange of murders, replicates that of Strangers on a Train. By the time Blake's book came out, Patricia Highsmith's classic was several years old, and had been successfully filmed by Hitchcock. Yet Blake insists he was unaware of this, and is clearly embarrassed by the coincidence that he also used two of the same character names that appear in Highsmith's story. In a preface, he thanks Highsmith for "being so charmingly sympathetic".

Some may think that it beggars belief that Blake was unaware of the earlier book. I am happy to take him at his word, even though it may be that some information about the film, if not the book, had seeped into his subconscious. It's common for different writers to come up with much the same idea, quite separately. And it's also the case that Blake's story develops in a rather different way from Highsmith's. Some commentators prefer Blake's book, but I think Highsmith's stands the test of time better.

All that said, I did enjoy this story. It's a good, fast read, and I devoured it in a single sitting. It's interesting that Simenon is name-checked in the story; he clearly influenced some of Blake's post-war fiction. Since Blake's book was published, several novels, by authors as diverse as Evelyn Berckman, Sheila Radley, and Peter Swanson, have used the exchange of murders concept in a variety of ways. And it's a concept with rich potential. One of these days, I'm tempted to have a go myself...   

The Passenger - 1975 film review

The first film by Michaelangelo Antonioni that I ever saw was Blow-Up (a film that gets a passing mention in the Lake District Mystery I'm writing right now.) I was seventeen or so at the time and it was quite a memorable evening. Mainly because the film was screened by the film society jointly run by my school and the local girls' school. In those days, societies which overcame the segregation of our single-sex schools were very popular....

Anyway, I enjoyed my trip to watch Blow-Up, but I never got round to seeing The Passenger, which is perhaps Antonioni's most famous film. I've only just repaired this omission. The Passenger is sometimes described as a thriller, but that's a label so unhelpful as to be almost meaningless. And indeed, the glacial pace is distinctly unthrilling. But the basic idea is one that might well have come from Patricia Highsmith.

A journalist called Locke (Jack Nicholson) comes across Robertson, a businessman, while working on a documentary in Chad. The businessman dies suddenly (from a pre-existing condition) and Nicholson discovers the body. On an impulse, it seems, perhaps inspired by his resemblance to the deceased, Locke decides to switch identities with the dead man. He falsifies his passport and successfully becomes Robertson.

Among other things, he abandons his wife (Jenny Runacre), and finds himself embroiled in Robertson's murky business activities. He encounters a beautiful young woman (Maria Schneider) and they become lovers. But you can bet that if his purpose in becoming Robertson was to escape his old life and to find something better, he will be disappointed, to say the least. And so it proves. The film is beautifully shot, but the bleakness of its philosophy is depressing. I'm glad that I finally got round to seeing it, though. It's an interesting piece of movie-making, even if there's less to it than meets the eye or than its reputation suggests.

Forgotten Book - Speak of the Devil

I've written more than once on this blog about the excellence of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, a pioneering American author of domestic suspense. Long before Patricia Highsmith came on the scene, Holding was producing unorthodox and compelling studies of criminal psychology which deserve to be better-known. A case in point is Speak of the Devil, first published in 1941, and expanded from a novella called Fearful Night.

The protagonist is Karen Peterson, a tall and attractive young woman, who is (and remains throughout the book) rather mysterious. She's very different in some ways from my own character Rachel Savernake, and yet there are one or two points of comparison that I noticed with interest. Karen is sailing for Havana when she is urged to take a job in a hotel by a man called Fernandez who has wants to marry. She decides, on the spur of the moment, and against her better judgement, to accept the offer of job, but not the offer of marriage .

The hotel is on the island of Riquezas, and given that Holding lived for some years on Bermuda, I wondered (without finding out the answer) whether to some extent the setting was based on Bermuda. Soon, a young woman called Cecily claims to have killed a man who was about to attack her. A body is found, but Miss Peterson doesn't think that Cecily is a killer. She starts to play the amateur sleuth, and encounters a sympathetic detective.

For a long time, I was unsure where this story was going. The cast of characters is small, and I was not clear how Holding was going to resolve the situation that she had created. But in a sequence of unpredictable (but not unreasonable) plot developments, she reminds us that, in a crime novel, nothing is what it seems. I found it all quite gripping, and another good example of Holding's quiet literary accomplishment.

Forgotten Book - Stalemate

Two men, each of them burdened by a wife who is no longer loved, but who refuses a divorce. How can they rid themselves of the inconvenience, and make the most of life. The two men do have a slight acquaintance, but it isn't widely known. They confide in each other, and one of them has an idea. Why don't they help each other out, by killing each other's wives?

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? This is an idea that has cropped up in crime stories time and again over the year. Of all the variations on the theme, Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train is by far the most renowned, though other good examples have been produced by the late Sheila Radley and the American thriller writer Peter Swanson. The book I'm referring to, however, is Stalemate. It was written by Evelyn Berckman, an expatriate American based in London, and published here in 1966.

My interest in Berckman was fired when I watched a film based on one of her books, Do You Know this Voice? It prompted me to acquire some of her other novels. And although the premise of Stalemate isn't original, it's handled in a fairly original way. The key twist is foreseeable, but it becomes clear by the end of the book that Berckman's interest is in character rather than puzzling her readers. And she is pretty good at characterisation.

I was particularly impressed by the quality of the writing in the first half of the book. Berckman has a pleasing turn of phrase, and there's an intensity about her prose which is appealing. In the later stages, there are one or two scenes which are perhaps over-wrought, and I was slightly surprised by the way she shifts focus from the main actors in the drama to a member of the supporting cast. So despite its familiar premise, it' becomes quite an unusual story. Not a masterpiece in the Highsmith class, but interesting.

Bonnie and Clyde - 1967 film review

I'm more than half a century late, which even by my standards is exceptionally tardy, but I've finally got round to watching Bonnie and Clyde, the highly successful movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway which (among other things) inspired a song by Georgie Fame. The director was Arthur Penn, whom I know best as director of a rather good crime film, Night Moves.

It was a historical film, set in 1934, and it's a tale of two outlaws. There are some similarities to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which came along soon afterwards, although the latter is more of a comedy, and has a superior soundtrack. Clyde Barrow (Beatty), recently released from prison, picks up an attractive young waitress (Dunaway), who is fascinated by his looks and his refusal to conform to society's norms.

Patricia Highsmith famously argued that such characters are dramatically interesting because they have a kind of freedom in the way they behave (I'm paraphrasing), and although I don't entirely buy into this argument, I can see its force. The trouble is that the likes of Bonnie and Clyde are essentially doomed figures. They are really not very bright, and neither is their hapless sidekick C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard). They also team up with Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman) and his wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons). The stellar cast also includes Gene Wilder.

It's a film that doesn't shy away from violence, and it was shocking in its day. Some saw it as glorifying violence, and historical accuracy certainly is not a strong point. But it was enormously successful and influential. I found it very watchable, and the relationship between the impotent Clyde and Bonnie is cleverly presented. Does it glorify violence? On balance, I'd argue that it doesn't, because you'd have to be very stupid indeed to see someone as brainless as Clyde as a role model. I suppose the counter-argument is that people with a propensity to violence are often very stupid, and crime should not be made to seem attractive. But you only have to consider what happens to the criminals in this film to see that there's nothing attractive about dying young and painfully. 

Forgotten Book - Edith's Diary

It's safe to say that Edith's Diary is one of Patricia Highsmith's less renowned books. It was first published in 1977, at a time when her powers as a crime novelist were, perhaps waning. Indeed, her usual American publishers rejected it, which must have come as a huge blow. But there are some critics who rank it with her finest work, and having come to it belatedly, I'm tempted to agree. It far exceeded my expectations, in fact.

I suppose the first question is this: is Edith's Diary a crime novel at all? One of the characters commits a number of crimes, almost certainly including a murder, but these are not the main focus of the story. And my answer to the question is: I think it can be described as a crime novel, but it really doesn't matter. I don't think it's terribly helpful to get hung up on definitions of what does and does not constitute a crime story. Some stories, naturally enough, occupy the borderlands between crime and mainstream fiction, and worrying about how to pigeon-hole them is a distraction .What counts is the quality of the story.

For me, Edith's Diary was a revelation in more ways than one. I knew that the title character, Edith Howland, kept a diary that becomes increasingly a means of living out a fantasy life divorced from reality, and this is an idea which strikes me as tremendously powerful and appealing. But even the diary is not the main focus of the story. Rather, the key is Highsmith's lucid but rather terrible depiction of a disintegrating life.

Edith's descent is charted over a long time span, with many political references which give the story a dated feel. She's a left-wing progressive, a minor writer and journalist who is married to an apparently (but perhaps not actually) decent man, and they have one child, the lazy, slobbish, hard-drinking Cliffie. The family is completed by her husband's equally idle uncle, whose continuing presence in the household Edith tolerates for reasons that aren't easy to understand. We sympathise with her, but Highsmith is relentless in probing her many weaknesses. The result is a novel that, for all its touches of wry humour, is bleak but memorable. 

Forgotten Book - In a Lonely Place

In a Lonely Place is a justly admired film noir starring Humphrey Bogart, but until this year I'd never come across the novel on which it is based, written by Dorothy B. Hughes, and first published in 1947. The book is quite different from the film in some crucial respects, but I must say that I really, really enjoyed it. It's compelling, very well-written, and just the right length for the material.

The story is told in the third person, but everything is seen through the eyes of Dickson (Dix) Steele, a former pilot who has not found the adjustment to peacetime easy. Hughes describes something that hadn't really struck me very powerfully before - how for some men, war service offered excitement, and a sense of achievement that was unavailable elsewhere. And she describes it so well that I was convinced by Dix and by his often irrational behaviour. He is a memorable character.

The setting is Los Angeles, and very well-evoked that city is too, with fogs worthy of Bleak House, and a strange mix of urban glitz and leisurely beach life. Dix is staying in the home of an absent rich friend, and renews a friendship with a former colleague in the military, only to find that Brub Nicolai has married, and become a policeman.

Given that it soon becomes clear that Dix is a serial strangler, this relationship offers both insight into the police investigation and huge risks. Matters are further complicated when Dix falls for a neighbour, a glamorous but erratic actress called Laurel. Hughes describes Dix's increasingly wild mood swings credibly and with occasional touches of cool wit. This is a very, very good book, and although similar ground has been covered many times since, the quality of Hughes' prose makes it memorable in its own right, and not just as a precursor to later books by Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, and countless others.

The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena - book review

The Couple Next Door is a bestselling novel of psychological suspense by Shari Lapena, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in the whirl of the Toronto Bouchercon last year. Shari, who is herself based in Toronto, is a former lawyer, and I've always particularly enjoyed reading the crime fiction of legal eagles who have managed to fly away from the desk, the computer, and the clients for long enough to write a novel.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I'm a long-term fan of novels of psychological suspense, and when I read them, I find myself not only enjoying the story (assuming it's a good one) but also of studying the approach taken by the writer - whether it's Patricia Highsmith or Celia Fremlin in days gone by, or Paula Hawkins or Gillian Flynn today. For instance, a key decision is whether to opt for a first person narrative, or a third person single viewpoint narrative. Shari Lapena has chosen the third person multiple viewpoint method, and it's a choice well-suited to her plot. A key reason why it works so well is that it enables her to shift suspicion around a small cast of characters in a very effective way.

In a nutshell, this is a "baby in jeopardy" thriller.  Anne and Marco have been invited round to dinner by Graham and Cynthia, the couple next door, and have unwisely succumbed to pressure from Cynthia to leave their tiny daughter Cora at home, checking on her regularly. You can guess what's coming, can't you?

It's a long time since my own children were as small as Cora, but anyone who's been a parent can, I think, empathise with the terror of Anne and Marco as their life together rapidly falls apart, with Cora missing, and the police deeply suspicious that one or both of them may be implicated in the kidnap. Losing your child is really a parent's worst nightmare. At least Anne's own parents are rich enough to be able to afford to pay a ransom demand, but is that really such a good idea? The moral dilemmas come thick and fast, and so do the plot twists. This is a pacy, action-packed thriller, brimming with suspense. No wonder it's achieved such success.

Carol - 2015 film review

Carol is a highly acclaimed film from last year based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith. The storyline has some elements familiar to Highsmith fans, but it's not a crime story, even though a gun makes an appearance during one tense scene. The book was originally titled The Price of Salt, and Highsmith published it under a pen-name (Claire Morgan) in 1953 after her existing publisher rejected it.

At Christmas time, an aspiring photographer called Therese is working in a department store when she has a brief encounter with an older woman, an elegant customer who is looking for a present for her young daughter. Therese has a boyfriend who wants to marry her, while the customer Carol, is married to a wealthy man who is prepared to use their daughter as a pawn in an increasingly acrimonious custody battle if Carol persists in her determination to end the marriage. The lead roles are taken by Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchettl and they are both superb.

Therese and Carol are drawn to each other, but as their relationship blossoms it becomes increasingly evident that the course of true love is unlikely to run smooth - even when the couple throw caution to the winds and go off together to such not-exactly-exotic locations as Waterloo, Idaho. There are some parallels between this relationship and those between the male protagonists of so many other Highsmith novels, including Strangers on a Train and The Two Faces of January; but there are also important differences.

This very well-made film cast fascinating, if depressing, light on the moral climate of the time. Highsmith wove autobiographical elements into her story, well documented in Andrew Wilson's excellent biography of her, Beautiful Shadow, while anyone intrigued by the account of lesbian life in Fifties America may also like to take a look at Marijane Meaker's Highsmith: A Romance of the Fifties (2003), a memoir about her doomed affair with Highsmith. Meaker's book I found fascinating, although regrettably less than kind abotu her former partner. Highsmith was a troubled woman, clearly very difficult to live with, but truly gifted. Carol is an excellent adaptation of a very good love story - and if you want to know whether it has a happy ending, you'll have to watch it to find out!.

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A Quiet Place - book review

A Quiet Place is a Japanese crime novel just published by the admirable Bitter Lemon Press. The author is the late Seicho Matsumuto, the translator Louise Heal Kawait. The book first appeared some years ago, but this is a new translation; I'm not aware of the novel having been available in Britain previously. I am developing a real enthusiasm for Japanese crime stories, and I was delighted to see BLP turning their attention to this rich source of mystery fiction.

The protagonist is a government official called  Asai. While he is away from home on a business trip, he receives a phone call -his wife has died suddenly after suffering a heart attack. Eiko was a youngish and attractive woman, but she suffered from heart problems, so although the news is as a shock, it does not come entirely out of the blue. However, when Asai tries to find out more about the precise circumstances of her death, he starts to wonder if she was leading a double life.

Asai plays the detective, and finds out more than he bargained for. The story is very low-key, and although murder is committed, this is not a whodunit. In some ways, the author of whom I was reminded was Patricia Highsmith. But Asai is not as compelling a character as the youngish men who so often get into deep water in Highsmith's fiction. Overall, I felt the story never really moved out of second gear.

Matsumoto (1909-92) was, nevertheless, an important figure in Japanese crime fiction. His books are notable for their social comment, and that is a feature of this story, although some of the points made are blunted by the passage of time. Much as I like Japanese mystery fiction, this isn't a truly memorable book, because there's rather less meat in it than I was expecting and hoping for. I certainly hope that BLP publish more of his work, because I'm sure that some of the other titles are stronger than this one.

The Two Faces of January - film review

The Two Faces of January is a novel by Patricia Highsmith that offers one of her most successful presentations of a relationship between two troubled men. I talked about the book a couple of years ago, and wondered at that time if the newly made film would be as enjoyable. The short answer is yes.

Hossein Amini, making his debut as a director, had to decide whether to update the story or set it in, more or less,the time when it was written. He chose the latter course, and I think this was wise. Modernising the story would have entailed major changes, a high risk tactic. Although, inevitably, the story doesn't precisely mirror the book, it is relatively faithful to it.

The settings in Greece and Turkey lend themselves to evocative camera work, and Viggo Mortensen, a fine actor, is very well cast as Chester. I'm a Mortensen fan, but much less familiar with Kirsten Dunst, who plays his youngish wife Colette, and Oscar Isaac, who is Rydal, the young chancer who cottons on to them. Dunst's character struck me as more intelligent than the Colette of the novel, a change that did the story no harm. Isaac is very good from start to finish.

The later stages of the film struck me as more heavily plotted than the equivalent scenes in the novel. Again, this made sense: much as I admire Highsmith, I don't think that plotting was her greatest strength, and sometimes the later parts of her novels don't work as well as the earlier chapters.One thing that can safely be said is that there is a special quality of vividness about her writing which means that it can translate to film very powerfully. This is yet another of the films of her books which make excellent viewing.

Forgotten Book - Something Like a Love Affair

Something Like a Love Affair was published in 1992, and not long after it came out, I seized the chance to ask its author, Julian Symons, to inscribe my copy. Under the inscription, in his tiny, immaculate handwriting, he wrote "A good title?" and then, under that, "A good book??" The title is not, I think, anything special, but the book is certainly a good one. It does, however, qualify for the description "forgotten". I've seen very little discussion of it anywhere.

In fact, I enjoyed re-reading Something Like a Love Affair even more than I enjoyed the story the first time around. One of the reasons is that now I can see more clearly than I saw then what he was aiming for, a fresh spin on a device introduced (unless there's an earlier example of which I'm unaware) by an author whom Julian and I both admired - Anthony Berkeley. It's a form of "whowasdunin" story. There are a few poorish reviews of this book online, but I take a different view: it offers a nice example of storytelling technique from a very talented novelist.

We know from the outset that the police have discovered a body, but we don't know whose body it is. The action then goes back a short distance in time, and we are introduced to Judith Lassiter. On the surface she has a lot to be thankful for: she is attractive, well-off,and has a doting husband. But she isn't happy, and as the story unfolds, we begin to understand why.

As in a number of his books, Symons combines a portrayal of mental disintegration with a cunningly plotted mystery. Nowadays, his fiction is much less renowned than that of his friend Patricia Highsmith, but I see quite a few similarities between what they were trying to do with the post-war crime novel. Highsmith was the superior literary stylist, but Symons' plots were cleverer. I've always thought it a paradox that it was she and not he who wrote a book about plotting suspense fiction. But much as I relished Something Like a Love Affair, I was struck by a passage which quotes from the day's newspaper headlines: trouble in the Middle East and global warming were major concerns then, just as they are today. As for the question marks.after "A good book", they indicate the modesty of the man. He judged his own work by exacting standards, but I think he was pleased with this one and I'd be pleased to have written it too.  

Forgotten Book - The Man Who Lost His Wife

The Man Who Lost His Wife, first published in 1970, was the third of Julian Symons' "Man Who..." books. I remember that when I was a schoolboy, having loved the first two of the books, I eagerly awaited this one. I borrowed it from the town library as soon as it came into stock, eager for another witty story and complex plot. Unfortunately for young Martin, Symons was trying something rather different and experimental here, and I was disappointed.

Recently, I decided to give the book another try. When I was a teenager, I was even keener on complex plotting than I am now, and certainly much less interested in books that are character studies. My tastes have matured - to some extent, anyway! - and this time I had a clearer understanding of what Symons was trying to do.

Gilbert Welton has inherited the family publishing business. It's an upmarket company, with a decent list, but Gilbert is dissatisfied with his lot, even if he does not at first realise this himself. He is, deep down, annoyed that he has followed in the footsteps of his dynamic father, and struggles to impose his own outlook, or even to be sure what his own attitudes are. He also becomes alarmed when Virginia, his second wife, indicates that she is discontented, and is planning to go away on her own for a while.

There are some good comic scenes, especially involving an avant garde American novelist, before the mood darkens. Gilbert goes to Dubrovnik in search of Virginia - this was when Yugoslavia was a Communist country - and finds his life becoming increasingly complicated. Eventually, he finds himself contemplating murder...

It's quite an interesting book, perhaps betraying, to an extent, the influence of Patricia Highsmith, but Symons' gifts were not the same as Highsmith's. I felt as a schoolboy that the plot was too slender and that Gilbert was much less interesting than the protagonists of the earlier "Man Who..." book. After all this time, my views haven't really changed. I found it interesting to read this novel, but once again I was disappointed, even though I admire authors who experiment rather than blandly following a formula all the time. Symons could do so much better - and after this flawed experiment, he soon returned to form.

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.

Harrogate - and a question

Other commitments have meant that I'm reporting on the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate ten days after it came to an end. But it was a really enjoyable week-end, and it's prompted me to ask readers of this blog a question.

The programming chair for the Festival was Ann Cleeves, and she is such an efficient person that it was predictable that the whole week-end would be very well organised. And it was. Ann would be the first to give much credit to the very professional team that handles all the arrangements. It all seemed to me to run like clockwork. As usual, there was much socialising in the bar and elsewhere, and I took the opportunity to have a number of meetings, not least with my agent, with whom I was discussing my future writing plans. The good news is that he is happy with them!

I enjoyed the hospitality of Harper Collins at a dinner on the Friday evening, and met a number of fascinating people, including a new author, Ben McPherson; I sense that his debut novel will be well worth looking out for. Later on, Ann introduced me to Brenda Blethyn, the extremely pleasant star of Vera, and I finished up having a long chat with an old friend, that very fine writer Peter Robinson. The following night, I hosted a table at the Sicilian-themed murder mystery dinner masterminded by Kate Ellis. Great fun.

On Sunday, I took part in a panel celebrating the life and work of Patricia Highsmith. The moderator was Andrew Taylor and my colleagues were Peter James, Perer Swanson, and Sarah Hilary. Sarah had just won the Theakstons Prize for best crime novel of the year, and this gave me special pleasure as some years ago I included an early short story of hers in one of my anthologies for the CWA. She is a real star.

One questioner in the audience raised the issue of the relative significance of the author's life and the author's work. And this is my question to you - how interested, if at all, are you in the biography of a writer? Do you think it's relevant to their books?

My own views on this have shifted over the years. I used to think that the books were overwhelmingly more important than the life. Now, I take much more interest in the biographical material. In fact, I now think that you can't fully appreciate Highsmith (who, admittedly, had an extraordinary life) without knowing something of her life. But I'm sure that plenty of readers would take a different view. So - do let me know your opinion, and why you hold it.. 

Forgotten Book - Eleven

Continuing my exploration of the work of Patricia Highsmith, I recently re-read Eleven, which I came across originally in the Seventies - it was published in 1970, and is a collection of eleven short stories, with a foreword by Graham Greene. In comparison to her better known work, it's a book that I think does count as a Forgotten Book, but it shouldn't be. I admired it when I first read it, and I was even more impressed the second time around.

Greene says, rightly I think, that Highsmith is "a poet of apprehension rather than fear" - in fact he relates this specifically to her novel The Tremor of Forgery, which he greatly admired, and which I discussed a few Fridays ago. He praises her short stories warmly, pointing out - which I hadn't realised before - that some in this book were written even before her first published novel, Strangers on a Train. As he says, "we have no sense that she is learning her craft". He picks out "When the Fleet Was In at Mobile" as his favourite, and it's certainly a poignant story, as well as being as dark as the other ten in the book.

Where I might part company with Graham Greene is in his remark that readers may sometimes be able to brush her stories off more easily than her novels, because their brevity means that we haven't lived long enough with them to be totally absorbed. For me, Highsmith is at least as brilliant a short story writer as a novelist. In fact, I'm tempted to say that her gifts were even better suited to the short form. I doubt whether this is a widely shared view, but I think it's no coincidence that, as her career wore on, she struggled to come up with dazzling new ideas for novels - returning to Tom Ripley time and again, for instance, and repeating some themes of earlier books - whereas she continued to write very memorable short stories. For my taste (and judging her by high standards), some of her weaker novels drag a bit. This isn't the case with her short stories..

Certainly, Eleven is full of dazzling, haunting stories. Two feature snails, and one a terrapin, but each is unique and splendid. "The Quest for Blank Claveringi", in particular, is one of the most horrific and gripping stories you could wish to find; it really is a horror story, but it also tells us something about human nature, in Highsmith's customary subtle way.  There isn't one story in the eleven that is anything less than excellent.

Forgotten Book - The House by the River

The House by the River tends to be remembered today - if at all - as a post-war film directed by the brilliant Fritz Lang. But the film was based on a novel written thirty years earlier by A.P. Herbert, and this is today's Forgotten Book. One thing is for sure: it really does not deserve to be forgotten, since it's very well-written, and in some ways well ahead of its time.

This is a novel that is definitely not a whodunit, but a portrait of a murderer. There's a tendency these days for some fans of whodunits to lament the fact that so many crime novels focus on character and setting rather than puzzle. But it's not a new development, as this book illustrates. Herbert focuses on the effect that guilt and moral responsibility for a crime may have on different personalities, and in some ways this novel shows him as a forerunner of the likes of Patricia Highsmith.

The main protagonist is a poet called Stephen Byrne, who lives with his wife and young daughter in a house by the Thames. One night, when Mrs Byrne is out, he makes a clumsy pass at their maid, Emily. One thing leads to another, but not in a good way.Stephen strangles Emily, and has to decide whether to confess his crime, or hide it. He chooses the latter course, and enlists the help of his neighbour and friend, a dour but decent civil servant.

The pair dump poor Emily's body in the river, but inevitably it is discovered. The twist is that John, the hapless chum, rather than Stephen, becomes the prime suspect. Herbert explores their intertwined fates in a way that would, I feel, have impressed Highsmith. I don't know if she ever read this novel,but it is worthy of her. Yes, that good. The Thames, in particular, is evocatively described, but there are also some very good snapshots of the supporting cast. All in all, a book that ought to be better known. John Norris, that very well-read blogger, is a fan of this novel, and as usual, his judgment is spot on.

Forgotten Book - The Tremor of Forgery

I first picked up a copy of today's Forgotten Book when I was a student, going through a Patricia Highsmith phase. Unfortunately, I only managed about fifty pages of The Tremor of Forgery before giving up. Later, I acquired a Penguin paperback of the same title, but only now have I got round to reading it. This time, I made my way to the end of the story, and I'm glad I persevered with it.

Opinions are divided on Patricia Highsmith and her books; but I do find that there is something hypnotic about her writing. Graham Greene and Julian Symons, no mean judges, thought that The Tremor of Forgery was perhaps her best book, but others will struggle with it, as I did first time round. For me, it doesn't compare to Strangers on a Train or The Talented Mr Ripley. I'm not even sure it's right to describe it as a crime novel; that isn't a label that the author herself applied to it.

It is, strange to say, a book in which not very much happens. An American writer called Howard Ingham is visiting Tunis - the idea is that he will work on a film with an acquaintance, who has yet to turn up. The Tunisian setting is unusual, and as with so many Highsmith books, the wonderfully evoked exotic location contributes greatly to the pleasure of the story, as well as somehow helping to make plausible behaviour that might otherwise seem highly unlikely.

Ingham becomes anxious, as well as lonely bored, when he doesn't hear from his acquaintance, or from Ina, the woman he plans - in a vague sort of way - to marry. He befriends an American right-wing broadcaster (there's quite a lot about politics in the book, which provides a mildly interesting historical context) and a gay Dane. Ingham rebuffs the Dane's advances, yet remains strangely drawn to him.There's a strong gay sub-text to several of the scenes.

An incident occurs which may or may not amount to murder. Ingham's conscience is sorely troubled, but (spoiler alert!) we never know for sure what happened to the victim. And that's about as action-packed as the story gets. It's an odd, low-key book, best read for the sinuous prose rather than the almost non-existent plot. On the back of my Penguin, a reviewer comments that he'd rather read Highsmith's worst book than anyone else's best. The cynic in me wondered if the preceding sentence suggested this was indeed her worst book! I don't think it is, but it definitely won't be everyone's cup of tea. Agatha Christie she wasn't, but she was an extremely interesting and intelligent writer..