Death for Elsie

Christopher Ricks

• Found in the Street by Patricia Highsmith
  Heinemann, 277 pp, £9.95, April 1986, ISBN 0 434 33524 X
• Private Papers by Margaret Forster
  Chatto, 214 pp, £8.95, February 1986, ISBN 0 7011 2987 5

Patricia Highsmith has been praised by Graham Greene in the good old way as ‘a writer who has created a world of her own’. She can be even better than that – when she takes a world and makes it not only her own but ours. She lurks in the murk where you have to peer to check if this is an – or the – underworld. In her seething city-settings, paranoia may be the saving of you, and yet paranoia does have, too, a hideously masochistic alluring power. She is the poet of these death-bearing pheromones of fear.