A.N. Wilson on chilling crime fiction
Patricia Highsmith would relish the current undignified spat between two of her rival biographers, one of whom, Andrew Wilson (no relation of mine), claims that the other, Richard Bradford, has not acknowledged his debt to predecessors. Professor Bradford calls his book Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires, and there are plenty of those displayed in Under a Dark Angel’s Eye: The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (Virago, £20; Tablet price £18). Highsmith’s view of the human race is neatly summed up in one of them: “When I see some of the people here, I count myself lucky to be a cockroach” (this from a story told by a cockroach about life in New York hotels). The stories are not all about murders. Nearly all of them, however, revolve on the human capacity for hatred. One of the most disturbing has two old ladies lying together in a New York hotel which is a sort of old people’s home. The sadistic tricks they play on one another will not leave my mind in a hurry. “In the moonlight, her face gleamed, toothless and demoniacal. She examined the cardigan in the manner of a person who toys with a piece of steak before deciding where to put his knife.” What she does to her friend’s favourite cardie is horrific enough, but the sentence also makes you realise that what we do to steaks is pretty horrific too. In one story, a man thinks of an ingenious way of disposing of his murder victim – turning him into a scarecrow: “Furthermore, he would enjoy looking at it through his binoculars from his upstairs window.” There is something masterly about that “furthermore”. The man had not reckoned on “trick-or-treat” children marching across the field towards the scarecrow. Whether you choose “The Heroine”, a story in which a seemingly perfect girl is taken on as a nanny by some all-too-gullible parents; or the one about the wife who kills her husband by overfeeding him with fatty foods; or the vacuum-cleaner salesman’s little habit of stealing trinkets from his female clients – you will find some shimmering moral surprise, something which takes you off guard. It is not just the sort of shock you get from a Hitchcock film (Hitchcock was the first to make Highsmith famous with his film of her first book, Strangers on a Train). It is her rare capacity to make the reader question the moral universe in which we all hoped we lived. To that extent, she is not just a good writer, she is a great one.
