Highsmith lived all her life by her pen and typewriter (an Olympia manual), starting off by producing copy for comics and later turning out a steady stream of suspense and horror stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Her novels never became popular in the US. Here she might sell only four thousand copies of, say, Edith’s Diary (1977)—and ten times that number in France or Germany. Little wonder that she preferred to spend her later years in Europe. The English-speaking world might casually slot her as a writer of crime fiction, but Europeans honored her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition represented by her own favorite writers, in particular Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gide, and Camus. (That astute critic Brigid Brophy once called her a Dostoevsky “whose gifts include humour and charm.”) Highsmith’s books, after all, explore human souls in extremis, chronicle men and women sliding toward breakdown, probe the fluid nature of identity, and generally conclude that life is little more than an absurdity and a cheat, when not a downright horror.

Such a bleak outlook makes even Highsmith’s best work upsetting and, to some readers, distinctly unpleasant. Yet she’s seldom graphic in her brief descriptions of violence and she never depicts the details of sexual encounters. The hallmark of her work is a calm, hallucinatory intensity built on sentences of unemotional plainness and clarity. Her hypersensitive protagonists, logically, inexorably, spiral downhill from ordinary anxiety to murderous rage and madness. Like animals keenly alert for invisible traps or New Yorkers in the first uneasy months after September 11, Highsmith’s characters move through their lives with an ever-increasing and sometimes justified wariness. Graham Greene famously called her “a poet of apprehension” who had “created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.”