Patricia Highsmith at 100: How the author’s chilling stories of murder have fascinated filmmakers for decades

Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament!” This famous line in Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 novel Strangers on a Train goes a long way to explaining the author’s enduring appeal. Highsmith (1921-1995) introduced new layers of psychological complexity to the crime thriller, one key reason why filmmakers continue to be so attracted to her. They love the way she democratised killing.  

The novelist, whose centenary is celebrated this year, saw potential subjects for her dark stories every time she stepped out onto the street. “I can’t think of anything more apt to set the imagination stirring, drifting, creating than the idea – the fact – that anyone you walk past on the pavement anywhere may be a sadist, a compulsive thief, or even a murderer,” she once observed.  

You never knew when her tales might lurch into violence. Take the scene in Anthony Minghella’s 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley in which Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), Highsmith's most famous fictional creation, is on a rowing boat with his beloved Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law). Dickie wants to end their friendship. He calls Ripley a “leech” and tells him he’s boring, “a third class loser”. Ripley’s response is to bludgeon Dickie to death with an oar. A balmy blue Mediterranean afternoon suddenly turns very bloody indeed.  

Highsmith did not even exclude herself from those capable of behaving in a perverse or sinister manner. As we learn in Beautiful Shadow, Andrew Wilson’s biography of the author,  Highsmith had been working in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s during Christmas 1948, when a beautiful woman in a mink coat came into the store. Highsmith was so smitten by this customer that she later travelled to the woman’s home in New Jersey “to seek her out, to spy on her,” as Wilson writes of her deranged romantic obsession with the stranger.  

Highsmith confided in her journals how ambivalently she felt toward the woman she stalked.  

“I felt quite close to murder too, as I went to see the woman who almost made me love her when I saw her a moment in December, 1948. Murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing.” Highsmith confided about her desire to “arrest” the object of her affection: “Suddenly, my hands upon her throat (which I should really like to kiss) as if I took a photograph, to make her in an instant chill and rigid as a statue.”  

The fleeting encounter with the glamorous customer inspired Highsmith’s romantic novel, originally published under a pseudonym as The Price of Salt, later re-published as Carol and made into an award-winning film by Todd Haynes in 2015.  

Some see The Price of Salt as a departure from Highsmith’s usual crime fiction but the motivations of her protagonists remained remarkably similar.    

In Strangers on a Train, written around the same time, Highsmith gives her seemingly wholesome hero (played in the 1951 Hitchcock film by Farley Granger) some macabre thoughts that sound uncannily like her own musings about the woman in the department store.  

“But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative.”  

In her centenary year, Highsmith will be back in the public eye. A selection from the lesbian novelist’s deeply personal diaries and notebooks, which she hid behind bedclothes and towels in her home in Ticino in Switzerland, is due to be published during 2021. Showtime has commissioned a new drama series, Ripley, in which Andrew Scott (Fleabag, Sherlock) will play the suave and amoral psychopath.    

Meanwhile, Highsmith’s 1957 novel Deep Water has been adapted for the screen by Adrian Lyne of Fatal Attraction fame. Billed as a “psychological erotic thriller”, it stars Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as a couple whose marriage has grown twisted and dangerous.  

Highsmith’s many influential fans stretch from Graham Greene to Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl. Flynn has cited Deep Water as a direct influence on her own stories probing violence and betrayal among couples. She has talked of “this sense of impending dread” in Highsmith’s fiction. “She’s a very spare writer. I remember having my body temperature physically altered, becoming physically chilled at some point,” she told The Wall Street Journal.  

It’s a measure of how well-known Tom Ripley has become that he is often a point of reference for any real-life killers and con artists with a smattering of charm. This week, several commentators previewing new BBC drama The Serpent, in which Tahar Rahim plays narcissistic murderer and fraudster Charles Sobhraj, have compared Sobhraj with Ripley.    

Whereas other crime writers’ work often becomes dated or seems tied to a specific period or place, Highsmith’s books have enduring and universal appeal. The film versions come in as many shapes as the different identities that Tom Ripley assumes. Hollywood directors and French, German and Italian art house auteurs have all had a stab at Highsmith. Ripley himself has been played by a wildly varied cast of actors, everybody from French heartthrob Alain Delon to Easy Rider’s Dennis Hopper, from the clean-cut Matt Damon to the scheming and malevolent John Malkovich.  

The author was rarely directly involved in the film versions of her work. “I try to keep out of it and not annoy anybody,” she told the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. Nonetheless, filmmakers swarmed toward her during her lifetime and her novels continue to be adapted for the screen today. Her work is slippery and hard to categorise – and that’s its attraction. She is at once a source for hardboiled crime dramas, for nuanced feminist character studies, and for elegantly constructed whodunits. Highsmith stories tend to have an enlivening, very mordant strain of humour. She referred to the “crazy amusement value” that Tom Ripley provided with his shameless and amoral behaviour, leaving all those corpses in his wake.  

Sometimes, screen versions of her work can become so bogged down in the warped and sticky psychology of the main characters that the plotting stutters. That was the case with British director Andy Goddard’s A Kind of Murder (2016). Based on Highsmith’s 1954 novel, The Blunderer, it is a stylish and well-acted but torpid drama. Its protagonists are two husbands suspected of killing their wives. Patrick Wilson plays one of them, an affluent, philandering architect in a miserable marriage to Jessica Biel. Eddie Marsan is the other, a creepy bookseller who exudes guilt even though he appears to have a cast-iron alibi.  

Intriguing in its own sour way for its insights into the misogyny of two main characters, the film lacked the morbid brio that characterises the best Highsmith adaptations. Neither of its truculent male leads are remotely sympathetic and the film has next to no action. By contrast, Ripley always makes engaging company on screen, whoever plays him, because, for all his skullduggery, he is enterprising and sometimes even vulnerable. We root for him whenever it looks as if he is about to be arrested or have his cover blown or is being teased and patronised. Highsmith makes us into his accomplices, a role we enjoy far more than we should.  

Highsmith was as paradoxical and strange as her best-known creations. As her biographer Wilson notes, she kept snails as pets claiming they gave her a “sort of tranquillity”. Listen to her talking to Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs and she sounds like a shy and dotty aunt but a century after her birth, her writing is as mischievous and subversive as ever. That is why filmmakers are as drawn to her now as they were when Hitchcock first adapted her work 70 years ago.   

Deep Water is released later this summer. The Serpent will begin on New Year’s Day at 9pm on BBC One.