Michael Robotham

I mean, my take on it is that it was a sort of cathartic expression of her own ambivalence about her sexuality and probably a desire to make use of her own observations about the world that she was living in and its attitude to homosexuality.

But, you know, the book to me, I don't find the book compelling.

I'm interested in it.

But where I get really interested is where it moves towards what I would describe as the real Patricia Highsmith.

And that's in places where love, the notion of sort of love affair is interesting.

inextricably linked with notions of violence.

And there are a couple of paragraphs.

There's one where she writes, they roared into the Lincoln Tunnel, a wild, inexplicable excitement mounted in Therese as she stared through the windshield.

She wished the tunnel might cave in and kill them both, that their bodies might be dragged out together.

And when it goes into prose like that, where the violence and the passion are intertwined, I mean, there's another bit where she's put to bed for a bit of a nap and she looks up at Carol as Carol sort of tucks her into bed.

And she writes, not caring if she died that instant, if Carol strangled her prostrate and vulnerable in her bed, the intruder, where she fantasises about the woman of her fantasies actually murdering her.

And those moments, I sort of, my frustration bubbles up because I think, oh, there she is, you know, there's the real Highsmith.

And she's sort of tempering that somewhat in the rest of the narrative.

Well, yes, he is a psychopath, but he's – I would argue he's a kind of admirable psychopath.

I mean, Highsmith in her interview said she didn't admire him, but I think that was completely – you know, she said that really because she was –

She was bowing down in that moment to a sort of conventional requirement that she should have some kind of moral judgment over her characters that in fact she didn't have.

I think she just wasn't honest then because I think she does admire Ripley and I think we all do.

I think that there's something about his desire to overcome his own circumstances and be something else, be something better that everybody identifies with.

And I think that's the kind of genius of that character.

And the way in which she is more psychologically astute about his rage and his envy than she is about the goodness or moderation of any other character means that he really has to be identified with by the reader.