As much as Patricia Highsmith wrote, there is one thing she always left out: herself. So it was a sensation when, after her death in 1995, 18 journals and 38 notebooks were found in her linen cupboard, written in without interruption since her college days.
A woman who travelled around half the world, lived at least two lives simultaneously and, from a cool half-distance, penned psychological novels about fundamental themes like love, alienation and murder.

»Every artist is in the business for his health«
Notebook, August 31st, 1966

Before Patricia Highsmith shot to fame with her debut novel Strangers on a Train, she wrote psychological stories. About uprooted immigrants, courageous lovers, intuitive girls and boys, sensitive spiders, and women and men buffeted around by the storms of life. Back then, her stories were published in school journals and women’s magazines.
All the more wonderful for us, as we can now discover these raw diamonds.

Sixteen early stories, four of them previously unpublished in book form:
The World’s Champion Ball-Bouncer
Primroses Are Pink
The Story of Sydney
The Legend of the Convent of Saint Fotheringay

Further included are the following stories:
Miss Juste and the Green Rompers, Doorbell for Louisa, When the Fleet Was in at Mobile,
The Mightiest Mornings, The Still Point of the Turning World, A Mighty Nice Man, Uncertain Treasure, Birds Poised to Fly, Magic Casements, The Heroine, The Snail-Watcher, and Mrs. Afton, among thy Green Braes.

Collected here in this stunning box set edition, The Complete Ripley Novels celebrates one of fiction’s most iconic literary characters. This collector’s item, featuring all five classic Ripley novels – The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley and Ripley Under Water – is published to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Patricia Highsmith’s death in 1995. The Highsmith literary renaissance, initially sparked by a 1999 film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley – which re-introduced fans and new readers alike to the unforgettable Tom Ripley, the debonair confidence man with a talent for self-invention and murder – continues in full force with three major Highsmith movies in the offing as well as the publication of this volume, »the most sinister and strangely alluring quintet the crime fiction genre has ever produced« (Entertainment Weekly).

Stories from The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder portray the murderously competitive desires of our most trusted companions. In this satirical reprise of Kafka, cats and dogs are no longer benign elements of a happy home but actually have the power to destroy it. 

In the darkly satiric, often mordantly hilarious sketches that make up Little Tales of Misogyny, Patricia Highsmith upsets our conventional notions of female character, revealing the devastating power of these once familiar creatures – The Dancer, The Female Novelist, The Prude – who destroy both themselves and the men around them.

Posthumously published stories from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, most of them psychological narratives, with a few crime and animal stories. Some of the stories are like walls made of rice paper behind which lurk the shadows of great human downfalls. In others, heroes watch their own aberrations in amazement until fate suddenly takes a turn for the better and evokes a shimmer of paradise and happiness.

These texts from Patricia Highsmith's literary legacy, written between 1938 and 1949 and published here for the first time, are neither crime stories, suspense stories nor animal stories, but psychological narratives. They introduce a young unknown writer who was too shy or too inexperienced to reveal the whole scope of her talent, and who succeeded early on in putting a turbulent, hectic and often desperate life into a disciplined artistic form and simple, almost brusque language. Fourteen stories, about the homelessness of big city dwellers, about knowing little girls, about lovers bound up in their dreams, and about sad, life-battered elderly men and women. They are about norms and norm-breaking, conforming and rebellious morals.The stories follow no pattern or method, they do not even reveal the handwriting of one author. It is as if the young Highsmith invented a new mode and established a new relationship with the world with each story. And yet the monotony of the familiar, the enchantment of hoped-for congeniality of spirit and the numbed steps of a figure expelled into mourning is captured with a great deal of tact, enormous sympathy, and an amazing feeling for trenchant details.

Patricia Highsmith's »other« biography in summary: born as the daughter of a fashion artist and a commercial artist in Fort Worth, Texas in 1921. Her favourite book from her parents' library: ›The Human Anatomy‹, an introduction to nude drawing. In 1938, after completing high school, Patricia Highmith attended a course in nude drawing. Studied literature and zoology at Columbia University in New York (her first short stories appeared in the college newspaper). She travelled to Mexico alone to write her first novel but returned to New York with a number of full sketchbooks and toyed with the idea of becoming a painter. She earned her first wage with texts and drawings for comics (including Superman), and she spent her evenings writing. Patricia Highsmith continued drawing, painting and sculpting even after achieving international renown with her first novel, Strangers on a Train, published in 1950. 1958 saw the publication of a children's book entitled Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda, with text and illustrations by Patricia Highsmith. – Following in the footsteps of her literary role model, Henry James, she travelled to Europe in 1949 (where she lived from 1963 until her death on February 4th 1995 in Locarno/Ticino) and observed the widespread destruction of post-war Europe through American eyes. She made sensitive, almost cheerful little pen-and-ink drawings and water colours of towns and landscapes which she used as scenes for her somewhat dark novels and stories. Her sketchbooks and diaries contain portraits of her friends and lovingly executed drawings of cats, as well as some rather alarming studies of snails.

The novel begins with a brutal murder, but is not, in essence, a thriller. Above all, this is a love story. At the ›Small g‹, a popular, gay-friendly nightclub in Zurich, the lonely regulars who have stopped off for a beer, some attention, or for a little flirt, cross each other's paths: Ricky, a commercial artist, with his little dog Lulu; shy Luisa; Renate, a dominating costume designer, who invites Luisa to stay with her and then spies on her obsessively; Dorrie, a self-confident shop-window decorator and trainee journalist Teddy, both of whom fall in love with Luisa… In an atmosphere of suffocating heat, these intertwined and often unusual relationships are faced with challenging tests and deadly threats.

Tom Ripley passes his leisured days at his French country estate tending the dahlias, practicing the harpsichord, and enjoying the company of his lovely wife, Heloise. Never mind the bloodstains on the basement floor. But some new neighbors have moved to Villeperce: the Pritchards, just arrived from America. They are a ghastly pair, with vulgar manners and even more vulgar taste. Most inconvenient, though, is their curiosity. Ripley does, after all, have a few things to hide. When menacing coincidences begin to occur, a spiraling contest of sinister hints and mutual terrorism ensues, resulting in one of Patricia Highsmith's most elegantly harrowing novels to date.

Carol is the only novel by Patricia Highsmith about a fulfilled love, a love perceived as happiness rather than a wicked delusion. Never again would the author, who began to work on this novel in the wake of a personal encounter, write such sensuous, poetic and erotic prose.

›The thing looked bluish-white, was about fifteen centimetres high, rounded at the top with what looked like a convolution or crease half way down it that disappeared in the earth. (…) Oktavian returned to the gravediggers, and realized that he had been holding his breath. He supposed, he was almost sure, that the growths out there in the darkness were highly contaminous. They would combine the carcinogens injected by the doctors as well as the original berserk cells that had caused the cancer. How large would they become? And what was nourishing them? Terrifying questions! Oktavian, like most medical students, sent chums an odd part of the human anatomy once in a while. It was almost a token of affection when a fellow received such a present in the post from a girl student, but something like this? No.‹ Grotesque ulcerations, which grow to immense sizes; huge cockroaches resistant to all forms of insecticides, which take over the control of a New York apartment building; whales, the pope, a weapon-loving US president – all provide the material of which modern (natural and unnatural) catastrophes are made.

When Ralph Linderman returns a stranger's wallet that 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.

Again and again the President's advisor has to recount the assassination attempt, how he saved the President's life by using his own body as a human shield. Today he finally feels well enough to »chase after mermaids on the golf course.« But the metaphor does not work, and because it does not work, it proves to be fatal. Andrew Spatz saw the young boy just a moment ago. Then the shimmering heat of midday and Andrew's feverish dreams are interrupted by a shot… from nowhere? The police say it came from Andrew's room. Ten stories from the years 1982 to 1985, about modern people in danger, about lost youths, unrequited lovers and middle-aged women and men making one last effort at happiness... Close-ups of souls that have lost their balance and who, in the midst of the crisis, acquire undreamed of (and often fatal) powers or, very seldom, sprout saviour's wings.

In this book, Highsmith analyzes the key elements of suspense fiction, drawing upon her own experience in four decades as a working writer. Throughout the book, Highsmith illustrates her points with plentiful examples from her own work, and by discussing her own inspirations, false starts, dead ends, successes, and failures, she presents a lively and highly readable picture of the novelist at work.

When Richard Alderman becomes a born-again Christian, his conversion rips his once close-knit family apart. He and his youngest son, Robbie, embrace their newfound faith, while his eldest son, Arthur, rejects it. Caught in the middle of the ensuing web of lies is his wife, Lois, as she struggles to keep the peace. But when the church elders start to interfere in Arthur's love life, events spiral toward violence.

In this masterful novel, Patricia Highsmith weaves a powerful tale about blind faith and the slippery notion of justice.