“A young man asked a father for his daughter's hand, and received it in a box – her left hand.”
The opening line of “The Hand” is not necessarily a typical example of the opening of a short story by Highsmith in the sense that it truly knocks the reader for a loop in a terse and immediate way. On the other hand, the overwhelming bulk of her short fiction commences with what could appropriately be termed a “grabber.” This grabber just so happens to be slightly more ferocious in its attempt to pull the reader into the story immediately in a way that pretty much defies defense. Seriously: how could anyone not read onto at least the next paragraph upon being confronted with that opening line?
“All life is a gamble, isn’t it? So why bet?”
The second most interesting aspect about this concluding line is that it could, in a very appropriate way, be the concluding line to any number of the short stories which make up Highsmith’s truly prodigious body of work. The third most interesting thing about it is that brings to a close a story that is defiantly atypical of that Highsmith’s canon: it’s not a murder mystery or any kind of criminal story at all. So, what is the most interesting thing about this quote? It is the final word of the narrator and the narrator is quite literally that “respectable cockroach” of the title.
“Ladies and gentlemen—and especially you, Laura. We all know suicide is a terrible thing—a shameful thing—in the eyes of most of the world, and especially in the eyes of the people of our great country. Consequently, both I and my closest advisers deem it appropriate that Phippy’s death be attributed to drowning in his own swimming pool after an early morning nip—dip.”
This humorous dialogue reveals Highsmith’s versatility. It is a speech given by the President of the United States in a story from the author’s very uncharacteristic collection Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes. Although her recurring theme of the psychological impact of criminal activity is alive and well in some of the stories, the most memorable tales in this collection take an unusual political turn down a path of satire and irony.
Yvonne attempted to poison him by means of arsenic in cups of chocolate at her house, but he recovered and thought this a greater and more charming proof of her fear of losing her virginity with him, though she had already lost her virginity at the age of ten, when she had told her mother than she was raped.
The emotionally flat tenor that nevertheless crackles with ironic detachment mingled with macabre content that marks this quote is far more representative of Highsmith’s short fiction as a whole than the above quote. Long paragraphs that are complex structures yet easily understood because of a precision of word choice is the mark of a story that identifies it as the work of Highsmith as easily as the vague and often incomprehensible one-sentence paragraphs of a Hemingway short story.
Even as he ate his suppers with his mother, went to movies with her, and delivered groceries, he was planning. He’d do something more important next time: start a fire in the depths of a big building, plant a bomb somewhere, take a machine gun to some penthouse and let ‘em have it down on the street. Kill a hundred people, at least. They’d have to come up to the building to get him. They’d known then. They’d treat him like somebody who existed.
Another distinctive trademark of Highsmith’s murder stories that sets her apart from the crowd is that very often her criminals get away scot-free. In the peculiarly titled “Woodrow Wilson’s Necktie” serial killer Clive Wilke’s serial killing is far less the focus of the narrative than celebrity that Clive seeks. Placing this quote within the context of it being the final paragraph of the story reveals with a shocking starkness that the focus of the story is not the crime itself, but its long-term ramifications.
