Although Patricia Highsmith’s short stories run the gamut from trenchant political satire to big bug horror, she is primarily known within the field of short fiction for that which made her famous writing novels: criminal melodramas. What is fascinating is even when she veers outside the genre with which she is most closely associated, she still pursues many of the same themes more often than not. What makes Highsmith synonymous with crime fiction is that she staked out a territory within that genre that for much of her career she shared with few other writers. Her stories are never typical whodunnits nor are they rightly termed mysteries.
Like the filmmaker with whom her name will be forever linked due to his adaptation of her first novel Strangers on a Train, Highsmith eschewed the fundamentally less flexible path of mysteries to indulge her more idiosyncratic creative talents in the far less restrictive milieu of suspense. So idiosyncratic is she—much more so than Alfred Hitchcock—that even identifying her as a writer of suspense misses the mark.
Suspense by definition implies that something that can be broken when the tension become too taut to be sustained. As an example, Alfred Hitchcock builds several layers of suspense in his film Psycho (unrelated to Highsmith) that eventually reach a point at which the tension must be broken: first with the murder of Marion Crane that effectively kills the suspense of wondering if she going to get away with stealing the money and then with the revelation that Mrs. Bates isn’t exactly what we’ve been led to believe. The audience knows Marion is dead and they know that Norman has been keeping his mother alive by literally inhabiting her personality. Everything is tied up nice and tight by the time the story ends. Hitchcock is called the Master of Suspense because he knew that his audience was only willing to leave the theater still not exactly clear on why the birds were attacking that nice little town because he hadn’t also left them in a state of suspense regarding the nature of the relationship between Norman and Mrs. Bates in his previous film. What Hitchcock could get away with once in his entire career, Highsmith made a career out of doing again and again.
The difference between traditional suspense fiction and the kind of suspense fiction explored by Highsmith is perhaps surprisingly easy to identify. The crime itself is the engine driving the tension in traditional explorations of criminal behavior whereas Highsmith focuses on the psychological consequences for the criminal—or “bad guy” or antiheroic protagonist--who would normally be clearly identified as the antagonist in the typical crime story.
Nearly every story in every one of her collections revolves around the collision of strangers pitting someone willing to do the crime with either their victim or bystanders who become psychological collateral damage. Whether the story is about a budding serial killer inspired by the tableau in the house of horrors wax museum in which he works or the title character in the Dr. Strangelove-esque “President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag” or a truffle-loving pig who engages in a one-swine working class revolution or a scientist obsessed with the snails on an isolated island in the Pacific Island, the formula—if you will—is almost always applied and almost always works.
Of course, in many cases the conflict creating the pervasive atmosphere of dread and apprehension is not always murder or even a transgression of the law. As previously stated, Highsmith is not really all that interested in the transgression of judicial statutes so much as she is the transgression of moral codes. And as her plentiful body of work proves, there is almost literally no end to the number of moral codes capable of being broken and creating the psychological consequences which is her true obsession.
Little wonder, then, that in a great many of Highsmith’s stories, those transgressions of legal boundaries often go unpunished or even unsuspected whereas the transgression of moral boundaries lingers unresolved.
