Michael Robotham

You don't get inside the heads of the good characters.

You get inside the head of the psychopaths.

and because we get inside his head and we understand what makes him tick it connects with our own humanity you know ironically it connects with our own frailties it connects with our own envy connects with our own rage and i think that on a kind of very camouflaged level to the reader we nevertheless are emotionally completely identifying with ripley

in his violence and in his aspiration and envy of the people around him.

Yeah, I think it's about identity really and about having the wherewithal to escape what you have no control over.

So, you know, for Highsmith she had no control over her childhood.

She had no control over her mother's mothering.

She had no control over her DNA.

She had no control over her parents splitting up and the stepfather she didn't like.

And I think that she was terrorised really her whole life by the fact that she had inherited a set of circumstances which had formed her and she didn't want those circumstances and she didn't want to have been formed by circumstances like those.

So in the same way that Ripley becomes Dickie Greenleaf,

Highsmith becomes Ripley and she puts her rage and her fury and her frustration and her sense of not being in control.

All of those things are kind of solved in a way by creating a character with whom she identified so strongly that she even

signs letters to friends or inscribes books with the name Tom rather than the name Patricia.

She gets a, you know, famous prize from the French re-inscribed to Patricia Highsmith and Tom Ripley.

I mean, he was real to her and I think that's because he had to be.

He had to be in order to eradicate the truth of her own identity

and her own past, which she loathed.

She was a very, I'd say she was sort of introducer in a way, I mean, notwithstanding Dostoevsky, but of the sort of cool killer, not just cool in terms of style,

sort of the emotional chilliness of his ability to commit violence, but also cool in terms of the sort of suave, handsome, charismatic idea.