The Crime Writer

April 24, 2017
When acclaimed suspense writer Patricia Highsmith, the antiheroine of this dreamlike, high-tension novel from Dawson (Lucky Bunny), moves into a Suffolk cottage in 1965, she welcomes the quiet seclusion. She looks forward to working on her new book, collecting snails, and maybe enjoying a weekend with her married lover, Sam Gosforth, who’s “everything I’m not.” Unfortunately, a nosy journalist, who Pat swears she’s met before, pressures her for an interview, and when Sam finally visits, her volatile husband, Gerald, follows in her wake. Pat has always been fascinated by what moves a person to murder, and she applies fierce resolve to the aftermath of a shocking act of violence that would not have been out of place in her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. Dawson smoothly marries fact with fiction to capture the famously prickly Highsmith while astutely exploring love, obsession, and the myriad shades of darkness within us all. Agent: Caroline Dawnay, United Agents (U.K.).

April 1, 2017
Suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith finds herself caught in a real-life situation that seems to have sprung from the pages of one of her novels.It's 1964 and Pat, struggling with her work and seeking to escape the fan who's been writing her disturbingly intimate letters, has fled to a small English cottage. Her preference for solitude is disturbed by a prying journalist, Ginny (who may have an ulterior motive), and her emotional well-being is disturbed by her affair with Sam, a married Englishwoman. This fictional Highsmith is a melding of both biographical details from the author's real life and a fantasy of what kind of person would produce the misanthropic fiction she did. Pat has little compassion for either the pushy young journalist or the old woman who lives in the cottage behind her. On the other hand, in a manner that seems deliberately modeled on Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt (filmed recently as Carol), Pat is absolutely unguarded against her love for the upper-class Sam. These two sides come together in a catastrophe that occurs halfway through the novel. It's a clever conceit, plunging an author into a scenario right out of her own queasy-making fiction, and it's adroitly handled, forcing Pat to live out her ideas of crime and guilt. But there is also something a bit naive about the device. Finally, it's as if Dawson (The Great Lover, 2010, etc.) is saying that only someone capable of committing the crimes Highsmith wrote about would be able to think them up in the first place. This homage to Highsmith is a curious mix of devotion and naivete.

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May 1, 2017

If, as they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, this fictionalized account of author Patricia Highsmith's 1964 sojourn in Sussex is high-grade flattery indeed. In it, Highsmith (the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley, among others, noted for her taut psychological fiction, who detested the label "crime writer") is thrust into a typical Highsmith plot. She is ostensibly seeking seclusion in an English cottage, but just can't seem to manage. There is a nosy neighbor; a stalker who may or may not have followed her to rural England; a journalist who insists on popping up in all the most unlikely places; and, finally, the author's lover Samantha (Sam), whose clammy husband is problematic. Many might wish him gone. In addition to remembered details of growing up in Fort Worth, TX, Dawson also incorporates more unusual aspects of the author's biography: invited to a party, she secreted hundreds of snails, along with a head of lettuce, in her handbag; they were her "guests" and presumably provided more entertainment than the humans on offer. VERDICT Dawson (The Tell-Tale Heart) obviously admires the prickly Highsmith. Fans of The Price of Salt (the basis for the 2015 film Carol) will savor this phantasmagoria. New readers who happen upon it unawares may end up seeking out the novels of Highsmith, who was as private and horned as a snail.--Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO

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