Patricia Highsmith Dies At 74 Her Crime Novels Won Wide Critical Acclaim In Europe

Patricia Highsmith, the American crime writer who wove dark, psychological tales of murder and intrigue, died Saturday. She was 74.

Highsmith died at Carita hospital in Locarno, said a hospital official in the southern Swiss town. No cause of death was given.

Highsmith published 20 novels and seven short-story collections. Her first novel, “Strangers on a Train,” appeared in 1950 after being rejected by six publishers. It was made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.

She was best known for creating Tom Ripley, a charming gentlemanmurderer who was also her favorite character and starred in five of her novels.

He first appeared in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” a likeable young American without any conscience who murdered a friend in Italy and impersonated him. The book received the prestigious Mystery Writers of America scroll in 1957.

Like many of her principal characters, Ripley escaped justice.

“I rather like criminals and find them extremely interesting, unless they are monotonously and stupidly brutal,” she once said.

Dennis Hopper played Ripley in a 1977 movie, “The American Friend,” based on the Highsmith novel “Ripley’s Game.”

Highsmith’s stories were published in 20 languages, and were perhaps more popular in Europe than her native America.

One of her favorite plots was to examine torturous relations between two very different men, although in 1952 she wrote under a pseudonym “The Price of Salt,” a story of lesbian love.

Her novels won wide critical acclaim. Graham Greene once described her as a “writer who has created a world of her own - a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.”

The London Times Literary Supplement in 1975 described her as “the crime writer who comes closest to giving crime writing a good name.”

Mary Patricia Highsmith was born on Jan. 19, 1921, in Fort Worth, Texas. Her parents separated before she was born. She never hid the fact that she disliked her mother, who married Stanley Highsmith and took Patricia to New York when she was 6 years old.

She never read other mystery writers like Agatha Christie or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, preferring Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. She also got inspiration from crimes she read about in newspapers.

Highsmith went to school in New York and wrote comic superman stories after graduating from Barnard College. She never married or had children.

Highsmith moved to Europe in 1963, and lived in Italy, England and France before settling in a quiet sunny corner of Switzerland.