‘She was a monster’: the real Patricia Highsmith, by the people who knew her

A new film starring Helen Mirren explores the Ripley writer’s later years, but was she really so rude and eccentric? Editors and publishers who worked with her look back Publisher and bookseller Otto Penzler has loved Patricia Highsmith’s work all his life, but their first meetin

A new film starring Helen Mirren explores the Ripley writer’s later years, but was she really so rude and eccentric? Editors and publishers who worked with her look back Publisher and bookseller Otto Penzler has loved Patricia Highsmith’s work all his life, but their first meeting was a washout. In 1984, she agreed to give a reading at The Mysterious Bookshop, his store on West 56th Street in New York.

The American author of the Ripley novels, then 63, had lived in Europe for 20 years – in England, then France, then Switzerland – and seldom made public appearances, so he had high hopes. “But no one showed up. We had maybe four people,” Penzler says from his book-lined office under the shop.

Now 84, with a tidy white beard and a warm, amused manner, he is just back from a crime fiction convention and still very much in the game. Highsmith, he recalls, had little time for her readers. “She was somewhat taciturn.

People got their book signed and left within five minutes. I had a two-hour event scheduled, so what does one do? With some authors, I can say, ‘Let me buy you dinner.’ Well, not with Pat.” She stonewalled his small talk about France with an “I can’t stand the bloody frogs”.

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