Chapter 1: What makes Patricia Highsmith a unique writer in psychological thrillers?
All right, this is going to be good, isn't it?
She's just such a dark and fascinating writer.
And they do terrible things in order to get what they want.
I think it's a brilliant book.
There are pleasures and little intense moments that are really terrific about this book. Pretty dark, engrossing, suspenseful, plot-driven.
There's some red herrings along the way.
She's a furious woman.
And of course, the talented Mr Ripley, the very best of the Ripley novels, is again, I think, a work of genius. It is really, really brilliant.
Hello and welcome to stories of dark suspense, questionable behaviour, assumed identities and getting away with it. Because this is a book club tracking the work of an especially difficult writer, and I mean that in a good way. Hi, I'm Kate Evans.
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Chapter 2: How did Patricia Highsmith's personal life influence her writing?
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.
Fantastic.
Well, she was an extraordinary character and a very unusual woman. And although we're going to be concentrating on her writing in this discussion, it's really hard to avoid that sense of her as an author. I mean, she had a terrible relationship with her mother. She was part of the gay community from the 1940s onwards, which is pretty interesting in its own right.
And apparently she loved nothing better than breaking up other people's relationships. She had relationships with married women and with other gay women. And Jeanette Winterson actually said of her, Highsmith loved a triangle and she liked to destroy it, axing the part of the couple she didn't want, but actually sleeping with her first. And she also became a bit of a recluse.
So, Joanna, what do you think you needed to know about her, though, to get into her dying days?
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Chapter 3: What are the themes explored in 'Strangers on a Train'?
Just suppose. Let's say that you had a very good reason. Now, let's... Let's say that you'd be afraid to kill her. You know why. You'd get caught. And what would trip you up? The motive. Now, here's my idea. I'm afraid I haven't got time to listen. Listen. It's so simple, too. Two fellows meet accidentally, like you and me. No connection between them at all. Never saw each other before.
Each one has somebody that he'd like to get rid of. So, they swap murders. Swap murders? 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.
Bruno and Guy meeting on a train in the Hitchcock adaptation of Strangers on a Train. I love that film. The book is different though, Michael.
Yeah, no, the book is very different. I mean, I think it's quite an astonishing start to her career and even though I think Patricia Highsmith was, I think she was paid a flat fee of $6,000 to sell the film rights and she was quite aggrieved by the fact that this film went on to be so iconic and she didn't sort of earn any more than the $6,000 she was originally paid.
But I think it actually established her. I mean, it was an astonishing way for a young writer. She was still basically, I think, still in her 20s when the book was published. An astonishing start to a career to have a director of Hitchcock's sort of calibre turn your first novel into... into such a successful film.
And it's an idea, that idea of swapping murders that's been used so often since then. I mean, even in a comedy like Throw Mama From The Train, which was the Danny DeVito comedy, that was based on that whole idea of swapping murders, which is a brilliant, brilliant sort of concept to launch a career on.
It's a pretty deceptively simple concept. Two strangers with no apparent motive commit these murders and it's all done away with, but it's never that easy, is it, Kate?
It's never that easy. And one of the interesting things that shifted in the film, I guess, is who does get away with it and what happens to the... how many murders are committed in the end, because there are two murders in the book and I think there's only one murder in the film.
That's right, yeah.
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Chapter 4: How does the adaptation of 'Strangers on a Train' differ from the book?
I mean, I don't think there'd be a writer alive that didn't wish that they'd had the idea for Strangers on a Train before Patricia Highsmith did because those ideas that really sing as any property, whether it's theatrical or cinematic or prose, are ones which are fundamentally symmetrical and simple and
There's something about the symmetry of the idea that is completely and utterly persuasive and exciting, I think. It's a sexy idea. And also that idea of corruption, I think, that there are two characters, one of whom is more corrupt than the other but whose moral culpability is infectious and
And the way in which Bruno drags Guy into the darker side of his psyche is also a completely mesmerising plot device, I think, as we see someone who we may identify with in the beginning as being like us, as kind of morally normal or conventional, but
gradually give way to their deeper impulses and I think Joan Schenker who wrote the brilliant biography of Highsmith said that the story attacks its readers right where they live and I think that's really true I think that it's that what she establishes there as a 29 year old writer
is that we can all identify with the protagonists who find that their own moral boundaries shaking and eventually disappearing to sort of unleash their darker, wilder, uninhibited, sadistic impulses.
What about you, Michael? I mean, how do you see this story?
I think it's, you know, very much, you know, it's a product of this idea that, you know, we're all capable of murder, which is something P.D. James used to always maintain, the wonderful... British writer P.D. James, who said we're all capable of murder in the right circumstances.
And this is what Trish Highsmith tapped into so brilliantly in Strangers on a Train, that morally we can all be compromised if the right buttons are pushed. And also because it's what makes it so intriguing as well is that it has to be murder because murder is the only crime you cannot make recompense for. You know, it's just so final.
And I think all of those things she plays quite brilliantly here in terms of creating that every man who is suddenly drawn slowly by a more manipulative individual, drawn into this web where they become trapped and have to desperately try to find a way out.
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Chapter 5: What can we learn from the character of Tom Ripley?
in that it's crime and no punishment. And he clearly knows her work very well. And he managed to record an interview with Highsmith in 1992. And it was not easy. He went to Switzerland. She sort of agreed she'd do an interview, but she wasn't sure. So she said he just had to turn up in the town square and she'd have a look at him. and decide whether she was going to do the interview.
So there's this sense of her hiding behind lampposts and trees and peering out to look at him. Eventually, she did let him come. He made the cut. He made the cut. But listening to it, it was a very difficult interview for him because she was so elusive. He asked these fantastically penetrating questions and she'd go, oh, no, I don't know. I don't really think so.
So it was a very difficult interview for him. But she did have this to say about Strangers on a Train.
Even Strangers on a Train, my first book, was classified as a Harper novel of suspense. It sounded rather intriguing. Back in those days, when I first saw it on the cover, it was news to me. And then as the years went on, I found that...
the publishers had created a line of books, not only mine, called Suspense fine, but it does categorize you and so that you cannot jump from that exactly to a book like Carol for instance or much later Edith's Diary which is a novel about an American woman whose life goes slowly she's a married woman with one son her life goes slowly downhill, there's no
To call it lacking in suspense is ridiculous because I always thought suspense is integral in every story.
That voice, Joanna Murray-Smith, had you listened to many interviews with her as you were creating her voice for the stage?
Yes, I did, I did. But, of course, once you're kind of embedded in your own work of imagination, you have to put aside all fact completely So I trusted that I had inhabited her in a kind of believable and truthful way through all my reading and listening. 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.
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Chapter 6: How does 'Carol' represent a departure from Highsmith's usual themes?
And she went home that night, she wrote an outline of pretty much the entire book that night. And even more, the obsession carried on because she tracked down the woman involved. And she went and she looked at this woman who was married with children and had imagined this entire affair, really.
You know, in the novel, she imagines an entire affair that begins between this young shop girl and this elegant married woman. But it was all triggered by this one chance encounter in the store.
And so this is often described as, you know, as a love story and as being significant because it's a happy ending. Well, it's a sort of ambiguously happy ending where these two women perhaps get together. But is it an outlier? I mean, is this a novel that's different from the rest of her work or do you see it as connected?
It's funny, I thought initially, I mean, it is different, but I mean, I started trying to read Carol a number of years ago, expecting to get the normal Patricia Highsmith sort of... Thrills. Thrills. And put it down because I could not, it was sort of drifting and I couldn't understand where it was going. And it was only when I pushed myself...
you know to to finish that the suspense was there it just took a lot it was a very slow burn as you feel that suspense building between you know that the forces that are going to come to bear on this young these young lovers you know uh in terms of you know what's at stake the idea that the the the married woman who begins an affair with therese you know carol she you know she is divorcing a husband she's got a daughter
There's going to be a custody battle. He has got private detectives following her. And this idea, if it's revealed that she is a lesbian, then that will be potentially it. She will never see her child again. Any chance of joint custody or custody goes out the window. So there is suspense there, but it's a different type of suspense.
You know, it's not a murder and who did it and whether they can get away with it. This is the suspense of whether this couple you fool, you care about them. It takes you a while to care about them. It took me a long while before I cared about Carol in particular. I found her very aloof and standoffish.
But eventually, when I understood why, I cared a lot about whether we were going to see some form of happy ending.
What about you, Joanna? Because the response from the publishers to this book after the smash hit of Strangers on a Train was very muted and they insisted on the name change. Do you think that maybe that was the end of another type of Patricia Highsmith career? Maybe they put the lid on that?
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of identity in Highsmith's characters?
Stop! Other people sail them. It's too much. You're making all the hairs on my neck stand up. Oh, yes, jazz. Oh, jazz, let's face it. It's just, uh, it's just insolent noise. I feel like he's here. Horrible, like the old bastard's here right now. Good. Brilliant. Brilliant! How do you know him? I met him in New York. Marge, Marge, this is scary. You've got to hear this.
Meet my father, Herbert Richard Greenleaf I met him in New York. Michael Rowbotham, who is Tom Ripley and what is happening in his life?
Tom Ripley is a social climber, a con man and a con artist who, and even Patricia Highsmith admitted, you know, the book, the premise of the book is based upon a couple of sort of outrageous coincidences in terms of he basically gets hired by Dickie Greenleaf's very rich father to go to Europe, to go to Italy and to try to encourage Dickie Greenleaf to return to America because his mother is unwell and
And Dickie seems to be living the high life on the trust fund allowance. And Tom Ripley, who is already, you know, being chased by creditors and, you know, looking over his shoulder because of some of his con work, jumps at the chance to go over to Italy to meet Dickie Greenleaf.
And you have this astonishing 50 pages really where he befriends Dickie Greenleaf, you know, becomes his sort of confident best friend They fall out and there's a murder all within this incredibly dense 50 pages and then suddenly you have Tom Ripley becoming this chameleon who becomes Dickie Greenleaf to try to get away with murder.
Yes, and you say he's a man looking behind him. He's literally doing that in the very first words. Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the green cage heading his way. We're arriving halfway through the first scene. You know, it's already on. And this is what one of the listeners from the ABC Book Club Facebook group was also taken by. And that's the economy of that set up.
Marie or Mari Peckham said, that the first chapter where we follow Tom as he's walking, looking behind himself constantly, who or what is he escaping? Why is he so nervous? He's unstable and down on his luck and in a really dark place and almost on the run. And the way Patricia Highsmith gets into the mind of Tom is what really got me into this story.
And then life offers him a lifeline and we enter the dark world he inhabits and it becomes darker. And this is just chapter one. Great one, Mari.
Now, Joanna, she takes us, Patricia Highsmith takes us into the mind of this man who, as Michael said, he's a bit of a grifter and there are a whole lot of class issues there. I mean, like in Salt as well. And this character is never what we think he is. And he leaps at this opportunity to travel to Europe. But what drives him? I mean, he's often described as a psychopath, but is he?
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Chapter 8: How has Patricia Highsmith influenced modern crime fiction?
To be someone else.
Yeah, yeah. Is that how you see it, Joanna?
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.
And she also plays again and again in her books with the sort of homoerotics, I guess, of switching identity and sliding into someone else's body. But the other thing, of course, that's happening plot-wise is the murders. And the... the academic Terry Castle. And I have to say, as an aside, the critical writing on Patricia Highsmith is just fantastic. It's funny. It's clever.
There's so much great stuff. And Terry Castle argues that Highsmith is the poet laureate of, oops, I killed him. What do I do now? So if we go to the murder and the crime plotting, Michael, how well does she do that?
I mean, I think the first murder, not well at all. Dickie Greenleaf's murder I didn't think was done particularly well. It was... I mean, later on, I know in each case Ripley tends to have to kill because someone's about to discover. So it's not as though he plans this for weeks in advance. He kills when someone's about to rumble him. But with Dickie, I didn't quite buy it in the text.
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