Michael Robotham

Well, I was in Los Angeles with a play on at the Geffen Playhouse there.

And the Geffen Playhouse is in the middle of Westwood, which is just about the only walkable area of LA.

And it at that time had what must have been one of the world's great crime bookshops.

And I was wandering in there in between rehearsals one day and I saw a new biography of Patricia Highsmith, which was the Joan Schenker biography.

And it brought back all my memories of being a little girl in bed with my mother in the cabin on this island in Bass Strait that we spent every summer and still do.

And lying in bed next to her before I could read and the way in which her eyes would track across the page with absolute compulsion.

and she would always be reading and Patricia Highsmith that was her preferred summer reading she loved thrillers she loved everything but she loved thrillers particularly during summer and I remember thinking as a kid you know what magic it was that a writer could use these hieroglyphics these black signs on on a white page to

take my mother, who was a very present, very vibrant and kind of volatile person, into this secret inner world with such intensity.

And my mother was very loyal to Highsmith.

She read everything she wrote and reread her.

And so when I saw this biography, it reminded me of those childhood experiences with Highsmith.

And I read it.

And as I was reading it, I was realizing what an

absolutely extraordinary character.

Highsmith herself was quite apart from the characters she created.

Well, the dying days scenario for the play, because the play is set over the three days before she dies, was really, I think, a consequence of my reflection that it

It was so sort of ironic that a writer whose entire life was spent writing about the glamour of violence should die such a pedestrian death.

I mean, she died of, you know, ordinary things alone in Switzerland in her occlusive life.

And I began to, I guess, speculate why.

along the lines of what sort of death would Highsmith have wanted?