The Blunderer Read online

  —Robert Towers, The New York Review of Books

  “An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there’s nothing quite like it.”

  —Boston Globe

  “[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “Highsmith is an exquisitely sardonic etcher of the casually treacherous personality.”

  —Newsday

  “To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability.”

  —The Sunday Times (London)

  “Highsmith’s novels skew your sense of literary justice, tilt your internal scales of right and wrong. The ethical order of things in the real world seems less stable [as she] deftly warps the moral sense of her readers.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Highsmith … conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil—personal, psychological, and political….The genius of Highsmith’s writing is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.”

  —Boston Phoenix

  “Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “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 … Patricia Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”

  —Graham Greene

  Copyright 1954, © 1956, 1966 by Patricia Highsmith

  First published as a Norton paperback 2001

  Originally published in 1954 by Coward-McCann, New York.

  First published in England in 1956 by William Heinemann Ltd.

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from

  this book, write to Permissions, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  ISBN 978-0-393-32244-6

  ISBN 978-0-393-34504-9 (e-book)

  W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born in Forth Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, published initially in 1950, proved to be a major commercial success and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite this early recognition, Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career.

  Writing under the pseudonym of Clare Morgan, she then published The Price of Salt in 1952, which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes. Her most popular literary creation was Tom Ripley, the dapper sociopath who first debuted in her 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley. She followed with four other Ripley novels. Posthumously made into a major motion picture, The Talented Mr. Ripley has helped bring about a renewed appreciation of Highsmith’s work in the United States.

  The author of more than twenty books, Highsmith has won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britian. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.