Совсем недавно, в апреле, издательство АСТ представило в переводе ещё один шедевр Хайсмит, в авторстве которого писательница призналась лишь тридцать восемь лет спустя. Причина? Крайне провокационная для пятидесятых годов тема: лесбийские отношения. Издатели боялись, что имя восходящей звезды будет «запятнано» столь вызывающим сюжетом и настояли, чтобы «Цена соли» [The Price of Salt] появилась под псевдонимом Клэр Морган. О дальнейшем расскажет сама Патриция Хайсмит:Привлекательность «Цены соли» состояла в том, что там всё оканчивалось счастливо для двух главных героинь, или по крайней мере они собирались попробовать выстроить совместное будущее. До этой книги гомосексуалам — мужчинам и женщинам — в американских романах приходилось расплачиваться за свою «девиацию» тем, что они резали себе вены, топились в бассейне или меняли ориентацию на гетеросексуальную (так утверждалось), либо же проваливались, одинокие, несчастные и отверженные, в депрессию, равную аду. Многие полученные мною письма содержали высказывания, подобные этому: «Ваша книга первая такого рода со счастливым концом! Мы не все кончаем самоубийством, и многие из нас живут нормальной жизнью». В других говорилось: «Спасибо, что написали такую историю. Она немного похожа на мою собственную...» Или ещё: «Мне восемнадцать лет, и я живу в маленьком городке. Мне одиноко, потому что я ни с кем не могу поговорить...» Иногда авторам таких писем я советовала переехать в крупный город, где будет возможность встретить больше людей. Насколько я помню, писем было поровну от мужчин и от женщин, что я сочла добрым знаком для своей книги. Так и оказалось. Поток писем не иссякал годами, и даже сейчас нет нет, да и придёт одно-два письма в год от читателя. Я больше никогда и не написала книгу, подобную этой...Читать продолжение статьи о книге: https://fem-books.livejournal.com/1993195.htmlСтатья об авторке: https://fem-books.livejournal.com/153126.html

В наши дни наиболее популярны произведения Хайсмит, объединённые сквозным героем: обаятельным и удачливым преступником Томом Рипли. Начавшись в 1955 году «Талантливым мистером Рипли» [The Talented Mr. Ripley], входящим в сотню лучших детективов всех времён, «риплиада» продолжилась ещё четырьмя книгами, из которых последняя вышла в 1991-ом. Все они изданы на русском языке.Том Рипли беден, у него нет могущественных покровителей, но он виртуозный аферист, а главное - человек, абсолютно лишенный представлений о морали и порядочности.Патриция Хайсмит выстраивает увлекательный детективный сюжет, одновременно пытаясь проникнуть в самые глубины души своего персонажа, дать ответ на вопрос, что чувствует человек, решившийся на преступление. Роман был удостоен премии Эдгара По, учрежденной Ассоциацией детективных писателей США, и неоднократно экранизировался."Статья о книге в сообществе: https://fem-books.livejournal.com/160805.html

Статья о писательнице: https://fem-books.livejournal.com/153126.html

With its sinister humor and genius plotting, Ripley's Game is an enduring portrait of a compulsive, sociopathic American antihero. Living on his posh French estate with his elegant heiress wife, Tom Ripley, on the cusp of middle age, is no longer the striving comer of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Having accrued considerable wealth through a long career of crime—forgery, extortion, serial murder—Ripley still finds his appetite unquenched and longs to get back in the game. In Ripley's Game, first published in 1974, Patricia Highsmith's classic chameleon relishes the opportunity to simultaneously repay an insult and help a friend commit a crime—and escape the doldrums of his idyllic retirement. This third novel in Highsmith's series is one of her most psychologically nuanced—particularly memorable for its dark, absurd humor—and was hailed by critics for its ability to manipulate the tropes of the genre. With the creation of Ripley, one of literature's most seductive sociopaths, Highsmith anticipated the likes of Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter years before their appearance.

"Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will stop at nothing."—Frank Rich Now part of American film and literary lore, Tom Ripley, "a bisexual psychopath and art forger who murders without remorse when his comforts are threatened" (New York Times Book Review), was Patricia Highsmith's favorite creation. In these volumes, we find Ripley ensconced on a French estate with a wealthy wife, a world-class art collection, and a past to hide. In Ripley Under Ground (1970), an art forgery goes awry and Ripley is threatened with exposure; in The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), Highsmith explores Ripley's bizarrely paternal relationship with a troubled young runaway, whose abduction draws them into Berlin's seamy underworld; and in Ripley Under Water (1991), Ripley is confronted by a snooping American couple obsessed with the disappearance of an art collector who visited Ripley years before. More than any other American literary character, Ripley provides "a lens to peer into the sinister machinations of human behavior" (John Freeman, Pittsburgh Gazette).

In this quietly terrifying exploration of trust and friendship, a troubled young runaway arrives in Villeperce. And when, on the boy's behalf, Tom Ripley is drawn from his lovely estate in the French countryside to Berlin's seamy underworld and into a kidnapping plot that requires the most bizarre methods - and sinister acumen - for intervention, the icily amoral Ripley is transformed into a generous and compassionate protector. With this psychologically intricate and hauntingly perverse masterwork, Patricia Highsmith warps all notions of friendship, gender, and morality as she explores the relationship of a young man with a guilty conscience and older one who has no conscience at all.

'One of the exhilarating effects of reading Highsmith's stories . . . is their surehandednes, their amazing breadth and abundance . . . they compel attention and they add significantly to her already formidable presence' Washington PostThe stories collected in Mermaids on the Golf Course, first published in 1985, are among Patricia Highsmith's most mature, psychologically penetrating works. Published in the latter part of her career, these stories reveal Highsmith's mastery of the short story form. Moving between locales as various as France, Mexico, Zurich, and New York, Highsmith transforms the mundane features of everyday life into an eerie backdrop for her penetrating stories of violence, secrecy, and madness.In 'The Stuff of Madness', Christopher Waggoner, increasingly dismayed by his wife's habit of preserving dead pets in their garden, enacts a devious revenge by adding a bizarre new exhibit to their collection; in the title story, a eminent economist's brush with death endows his once-familiar desires with tragic consequences; and in 'A Shot from Nowhere', a young painter who witnesses a gruesome death on a vacant Mexican Street becomes trapped in an unimaginable nightmare.In these piercing stories, Highsmith creates a world all the more frightening because we recognise it as our own...

'These little tales are tremendous fun, glorious hand grenades lobbed at the reader by a gleeful, cackling Patricia Highsmith' Dan Rhodes Little Tales of Misogyny is Highsmith's legendary, cultish short-story collection. With an eerie simplicity of style, Highsmith turns our next-door neighbours into sadistic psychopaths, lying in wait among white picket fences and manicured lawns. In these darkly satirical, often hilarious, sketches you'll meet seemingly familiar women with the power to destroy both themselves and the men around them. 'The No.1 Greatest Crime Writer' The Times

Completed just months before Patricia Highsmith's death in 1995, Small g explores the labyrinthine intricacies of passion, sexuality, and jealousy in a charming tale of love misdirected.'What is most remarkable in this novel is the empathy . . . with which Highsmith writes about gay men . . . one can imagine the small g existing, a piquant mixture of bohemianism and respectability, exactly as Highsmith describes it' Francis King, SpectatorAt the 'small g', a Zurich bar known for its not exclusively gay clientele, the lives of a small community are played out one summer.Rickie Markwalder is a designer whose lover Petey was brutally murdered. Rickie and his performing dog Lulu are regulars at the bar, as are vindictive Renate, a seamstress, and her teenage apprentice Luisa. Into their lives comes Teddie, impressionable and beautiful, and a catalyst for the series of events that will change everything.Patricia Highsmith's final novel is an intricate exploration of love and sexuality, the depths of spite and the triumph of human kindness. It is a work that, in the tradition of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, shows us how bizarre and unpredictable love can be. Small g, in the words of her biographer Andrew Wilson, is an 'extended fairy tale suggesting that...happiness is precarious and...romance should be embraced.'

People Who Knock on the Door, is a tale about blind faith and the slippery notion of justice that lies beneath the peculiarly American veneer of righteousness.'A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental . . . Highsmith achieves the effect of the occult without any resources to supernatural machinery' New York Times Book ReviewIn a pitiless story of prying suburban self-righteousness, Patricia Highsmith introduces the Alderman family as they descend into moral crisis. When small-town insurance salesman Richard Alderman becomes a born-again Christian, his once tight-knit family quickly begins to rip apart at the seams. He and his youngest son, Robbie, embrace their newfound faith, while his elder son Arthur rejects it. Caught in the middle of the ensuing web of lies, his wife, Lois, tries to keep the family together, but when the church elders start to interfere in Arthur's love life, events spiral toward violence. In this masterful late work, Highsmith weaves a powerful tale about blind faith and the peculiar ideas of justice that lie underneath the veneer of respectability.

'Edith's fall takes the form of a psychological chiller, but there is also something larger, the poignancy of her struggle not to go under. She is betrayed by such ordinary dreams' New York TimesEdith Howland's diary is her most precious possession, and as she is moving house she is making sure it's safe. A suburban housewife in fifties America, she is moving to Brunswick with her husband Brett and her beloved son, Cliffie, to start a new life for them all. She is optimistic, but most of all she has high hopes for her new venture with Brett, a local newspaper, the Brunswick Corner Bugle.Life seems full of promise, and indeed, to read her diary, filled with her most intimate feelings and revelations, you would never think otherwise. Strange, then, that reality is so dangerously different . . .

'Highsmith is a giant of the genre. The original, the best, the gloriously twisted Queen of Suspense' Mark Billingham'Dear Sir, I suppose you are pretty pleased with yourself? Superior to everyone, you think. A fancy apartment and a snob dog. You are a disgusting little machine, nothing else. Your days are numbered.'Ed Reynolds, an editor at a prestigious publishing house, has received a number of anonymous poison pen letters. He has no idea who could bear him such a grudge. Returning home one night, he finds a ransom note for his wife's beloved French poodle: 'I have your dog Lisa. She is well and happy . . . I gather the dog is important to you? We'll see!' The criminal has hit the Manhattan couple where it hurts most. And so, with this bizarre event, their nightmare begins. A Dog's Ransom captures the fragility of middle-class life in this riveting, scathing tale.

Under the hot desert sun nothing is quite as it seems. Howard Ingham, an American writer, is sent to Tunisia to gather material for a movie, a love story too sordid to be set in America. But his director fails to arrive as scheduled and the erratic mails bring news of infidelities and suicide. Ingham—for reasons obscure even to himself—decides to stay on and work instead on a novel. Gradually, however, a series of peculiar events—a hushed-up murder, a vanished corpse, and secret broadcasts to the Soviet Union—lures him inexorably into the deep, ambivalent shadows of this Arab town; into deceit and away from conventional morality. And when Ingham finds an accomplice to murder, or perhaps something more, what is in question is not justice or truth, but the state of his oddly quiet conscience.

When Ralph Linderman returns a stranger’s wallet he found during a morning stroll through Greenwich Village, he is entirely unprepared for the complex maze of sexual obsession and disturbing psychological intrigue he is about to be drawn into. Patricia Highsmith, author of The Tremor of Forgery, Strangers on a Train, and The Cry of the Owl has once again created an unsettling thriller that explores the bleakest alleyways of human desire. Highsmith has been called “one of the finest crime novelists” by the New York Times and is now considered one of the most original voices in twentieth-century American fiction.

Трагическая и необъяснимая гибель жены раскалывает надвое жизнь Рея Гаррета. Казалось бы, молодых супругов, увлеченных карьерой в мире искусства, ждало безоблачное будущее, однако вскоре юную жену находят в ванне со вскрытыми венами. Версия самоубийства не устраивает отца девушки, и, встретившись в Венеции с бывшим зятем, он открывает на него настоящую охоту. На пустынных ноябрьских набережных, где слышен только плеск свинцовых волн, одержимый ненавистью преследователь подстерегает свою жертву. Однако после двух неудачных покушений они странным образом меняются ролями...

'Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night' New YorkerSydney Bartleby has killed his wife. At least, he has thought about it, compulsively, repeatedly, plotting schemes, designing escapes, forging alibis. Of course he has; he's a thriller writer. He even knows how to dispose of her body. But when Alicia takes a long, unannounced holiday, Sydney descends into the treacherous world of his own fantasy.A masterpiece of noir fantasy in which Highsmith revels in eliciting the unsettling psychological forces that lurk beneath the surface of everyday life.

'The Glass Cell has lost little of its disturbing power . . . Highsmith was a genuine one-off, and her books will haunt you' Daily TelegraphPhilip Carter has spent six years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. On his release his beautiful wife is waiting for him. He has never had any reason to doubt her. Nor their friend, Sullivan. Carter has never been suspicious, or violent. But prison can change a man.In 1961, Patricia Highsmith received a fan letter from a prison inmate. A correspondence ensued and Highsmith became fascinated with the psychological traumas that incarceration can inflict.

Честер Макфарланд — весьма обеспеченный человек, ему сорок два, недавно он женился на прелестной Колетте. И все бы хорошо, но махинации, которые Честер совершал с ценными бумагами, вскрылись, и ему вместе с молодой супругой пришлось пуститься в бега. Райделу Кинеру двадцать пять, он — неблагодарный и даровитый сын гарвардского профессора, порвавший с семьей. Случайная встреча двух американцев в коридоре греческой гостиницы повлекла за собой целую череду непредсказуемых и трагических событий...

Robert Forester, depressed after a painful divorce, begins to spy on Jenny, his pretty young neighbour. Watching her, bright and seemingly carefree, alleviates his loneliness and helps him escape the discontent of his life. Caught in the act, he is surprised when Jenny invites him in, but all is not what it seems. With striking clarity and horrible inevitability, Forester becomes caught up in a series of deaths in which he, although the innocent bystander, is presumed guilty.'The No.1 Greatest Crime Writer' The Times

Too much love can be a bad thing.'Highsmith was every bit as deviant and quirky as her mischievous heroes, and didn't seem to mind if everyone knew it' J. G. Ballard, Daily TelegraphDavid Kelsey has an invincible conviction that life is going to work out just as he has planned it - if he can just fix 'the situation'. His one true love, the brilliant, beautiful Annabelle, has married another man. But that doesn't mean they can't still be friends. And even though she is pregnant with her husband Gerald's baby, that surely doesn't mean she won't one day get back together with David. She still loves him, of that he is certain. David is sure she'll take him back, and, under an alias, is setting up a wonderful home for the two of them in a town close by. And everything is just about going to plan until things take a murderous turn, leaving David a desperate man on the run.

Ram�n mends furniture. Theodore paints. A devout Catholic, Ram�n lives in Mexico City, not far from where he was born into poverty. Theodore, a rich German transplanted to a country where money buys some comfort but no peace, believes in nothing at all. You'd think the two had nothing in common. Except, of course, that both had slept with Lelia. The two were good friends, so neither minded sharing her affections. They did mind, however, when Lelia was found raped, murdered, and horribly mutilated. The two friends, suspects both, twist in a limbo of tension and doubt, each seeking his own form of solace and truth.

'My suspicion is that when the dust has settled and when the chronicle of 20th-century American literature comes to be written, history will place Highsmith at the top of the pyramid, as we should place Dostoevsky at the top of the Russian hierarchy of novelists' A. N. Wilson, Daily TelegraphThe Blunderer was written by Highsmith in between Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley. The novel follows the young, successful and handsome, Walter Stackhouse who seems to have it all, that is, until the day his wife's body is found at the bottom of a cliff. Under the intense scrutiny of the investigation he commits one mistake, then another, until - in true Highsmithian fashion - Walter finds his perfect life derailed. Now Walter is running from the obsessions of the murderer, and the suspicions of the lead cop, not to mention his own increasingly life-threatening blunders.