Richard Bradford

Each fellow does the other fellow's murder, then there's nothing to connect them.

Each one has murdered a total stranger.

Like you do my murder, I do yours.

We're coming into my station.

That's fine, thanks.

There's no evidence that she researched the mind of criminals, psychopaths, or if you want to put it that way, sociopaths at all.

She was simply a very acute observer of the human condition, including her own.

So

Basically, she created her characters partly from her imagination and partly from what she saw among people she knew or very often people she didn't know.

It depends what you mean by obsessive tendencies.

She was, I suppose, if you're going to use somewhat deprecating terms, something of a nymphomaniac in the sense that she had an enormous number of girlfriends, lovers, and so on and so on.

And again, that was probably because at the time, legally speaking,

Or in terms of social conventions, she couldn't have a settled relationship, she being a lesbian.

The woman with whom she had the closest relationship was called Ellen Blumenthal.

And although their actual affair lasted only, what, I suppose two years, for the rest of their lives, they were never completely out of touch.

And it was a sort of mutually addictive relationship.

But on one occasion...

when they were coming to the close of their actual affair.

Blumenthal, in the flat that they shared in New York, took a gigantic overdose of barbiturates, washed down with about half a bottle of vodka.

Highsmith watched her do this, said nothing, walked out, closed the door, went off with friends, with one of whom she had sex, and simply waited for her lover, erstwhile lover, to die.