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“... This book is already celebrated for its suggestion of an incestuous relationship between Simenon and his only daughter, Marie-Jo, a suicide at 25 in 1978. Any such relationship seems to have been one-sided – on the daughter’s part, and that only in her head. Marie-Jo’s contribution to Intimate Memoirs takes up the last 150 pages, and is called ‘Marie-Jo’s Book ...”

“... Gordon Burn gives us no comment of his own on the story he has to tell – just the facts: no speculation as to why Peter Sutcliffe behaved as he did, just the events, the family life, anecdotes that may or may not be pertinent, the pubs and their atmosphere. And we go back, or rather from the beginning of the book we go forward – from Sutcliffe’s grandparents on both sides ...”

“... Beryl Bainbridge. All have crime at the heart of their novels. None of them is a crime novelist. Patricia Highsmith is. And in making murder her main point, she has avoided being thought of primarily as a woman novelist. She has made a career of producing books of settled menace, in which acts of homicide surface, almost welcomed, as breaks in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... said. Strafe agreed, kindly adding, ‘Look dear, if the chap actually interfered with you ...’ Patricia Highsmith’s new collection is as disappointing as her earlier collections, and even the most besotted admirers of her novels must concede that the short story is a form she ought to be restrained from dabbling in. Too many of the pieces in The ...”

“... For me, the name ‘Patricia Highsmith’ designates a sacred territory: she is the One whose place among writers is that which Spinoza held for Gilles Deleuze (a ‘Christ among philosophers’). I learned a lot about her from Andrew Wilson’s biography, a book which strikes the right balance between empathy and critical distance ...”

“... was​ a disturbing conjunction: trying to finish an unsavoury new biography of the crime novelist Patricia Highsmith while at the same time confronting the Götterdämmerung finale of the Trump presidency, the raucous and rancorous live-stream mob assault of 6 January on ‘our nation’s Capitol’ (for maximum effect, the phrase needs to be intoned ...”

“... Worth, the reader feels sure, is making an entry into temptation, not into triumph. The Jesus of Patricia Highsmith makes his menacing appearance in Chalmerston, Indiana. People Who Knock on the Door is the story of a sort of Christian martyrdom, observed with total lack of sympathy by the victim’s older son, Arthur. Miss ...”

“... their stultifying families. And it is interesting, in the light of the works reviewed here, that Patricia Highsmith also seems to have been one of those who felt the need to rename herself before going on to make a name for herself as a novelist. With George Eliot – the most famous nom de plume in English fiction – it was not just a case of breaking ...”

“... anecdotes and reflections; notes on Kafka as well as on mass-cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to opera (Wagner, Mozart); jokes from the Marx Brothers; outbursts of obscenity, scatological as well as sexual; interventions in the history of philosophy, from Spinoza and Kierkegaard to Kripke and Dennett; analyses of ...”

“... BC? and is now just eighth cent. BC; hermeticism replaces Hermes, Georgette Heyer the Hexenhammer, Patricia Highsmith Hildesheim or possibly the Heythrop Hunt. Adrian Henri, but not R. McGough or B. Patten, is allowed in, perhaps because he fitted better into the space left by Henri IV. Sometimes both editors are unhelpful, as when Harvey’s inadequate ...”

“... her being a woman on her own in an isolated house in a strange country (Daphne Du Maurier out of Patricia Highsmith) is exploited in scenes where it seems things are going on which are being kept from her – but is she imagining it? Then she is in London. There are phone calls about a reconciliation. Later what we have been reading is read by Jake. In ...”

“... Dublin Murder Squad series. She has been celebrated as a stylish genre defier, in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith and Richard Price – and her books sell. French’s opening salvo was leaving one of the chief mysteries in her first novel, In the Woods, unsolved. Since then, she has demonstrated remarkable range. The classic detective series follows a ...”

“... wrong-doers in thrillers and crime fiction tends to be pretty perfunctorily sketched, and is – Patricia Highsmith excepted – almost invariably told rather than shown. Ruth Rendell’s great strength as a practitioner of the two genres has been her genuine interest in the psychology of the perpetrators of crime, an interest in how criminals think and ...”

“... chatter, ably moderated by, in my time, Roger Alton and then Helen Oldfield. Does anyone know Patricia Highsmith, or who her agent is? Surely Hepzibah can’t be as powerful as all that. I don’t disbelieve you but if we suggested anything of the sort Sotheby’s would megasue the next day. It would be quite wrong not to review lots of ...”