Michael Robotham

And then I had to sort of abandon it and just go with what I had retained and allow my imagination to sort of roll with it.

But, I mean, I think that...

It's kind of fascinating what she says because she was the master of suspense.

And of course, suspense, everybody who writes, who engages in any kind of storytelling, really in any form, understands the notion of suspense because it's about a connection, an emotional connection with the receiver of the work.

And without that emotional connection, you can't really succeed, I think, as an artist.

But, you know, what's sort of fascinating, I think, listening to her like that, talking about herself is how sort of well-mannered she is and sort of moderate she sounds.

And, you know, I'm always fascinated when I watch her in interviews.

There's one interview she did, I think, in the 70s with a panorama or an English woman, female interviewer, where she's sort of positively intimidated by the interviewer's class and

And I've always sort of felt that in as much as people talk about Highsmith being obsessed with certain things, and she certainly is obsessed with transformation and the transcending of who you are to become someone else and those sort of things, she's also absolutely fascinated by class.

And that plays, I think, a lot into her adulation of Ripley and his character as

And her own sense of, you know, in Ripley when you get that sense of the sort of desire for him to be Dickie Greenleaf and to absorb Dickie Greenleaf's life, it's about making up for things which your own life and your own biography lacked.

And I think that Highsmith did that really.

She invested in her characters.

in a way that she wanted them to reconceive her and make up for her own lacking in terms of her own biography and her own childhood.

She admired what she wasn't and she wanted to repair that.

I don't think so.

I don't think that was ever where she was really heading.

I mean, I think it was something that she needed to express.

I think that book was a book that she needed to write.

But I think it was...