The Crime Writer
As seen:
By Jill Dawson
avg rating
1 review
In 1964, the eccentric American novelist Patricia Highsmith is hiding out in a cottage in Suffolk, to concentrate on her writing and escape her fans. She has another motive too – a secret romance with a married lover based in London.
Unfortunately it soon becomes clear that all her demons have come with her. Prowlers, sexual obsessives, frauds, imposters, suicides and murderers: the tropes of her fictions clamour for her attention, rudely intruding on her peaceful Suffolk retreat. After the arrival of Ginny, an enigmatic young journalist bent on interviewing her, events take a catastrophic turn. Except, as always in Highsmith’s troubled life, matters are not quite as they first appear . . .
Masterfully recreating Highsmith’s much exercised fantasies of murder and madness, Jill Dawson probes the darkest reaches of the imagination in this novel – at once a brilliant portrait of a writer and an atmospheric, emotionally charged, riveting tale.
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Most of our number, who started this book, did finish it, as it was quite an easy read. Some thought it became a little tedious at times, but it picked up again. We wondered how Jill Dawson managed to imply that Ms Highsmith committed a murder – or did she. It was not clear if the events were real or written as a dream sequence.
We all thought it was clever to have written the book in the style of Patricia Highsmith and we understand that many of the small details in the book were correct, for example, her fascination with snails and the fact that she went to a function with a rotting head of lettuce and snails in her handbag. She was a complex character and this came through in the writing. It appeared that she had a troubled childhood and did not get on with her mother. On the one hand Patricia was reported to be mean, cruel, unloved and unloving but on the other more positive side she was considered plain spoken, dryly funny, difficult, but a brilliant writer.
Most of the characters were really quite unlikeable but we did like the character Ronnie, as he came across as sympathetic to her, perhaps the only person in the book who liked her, not just for what she could give them. We were confused however as to how he became such a close confidante so quickly as she appears to have only met after recently moving to the village
To sum up, we quite enjoyed the book and did feel inclined to find out more about Patricia Highsmith. Writing in the style of the main character, we thought was clever. Out of 10, we scored it a 6.
