Patricia Highsmith – the crime writer most likely to have been a murderer herself

Most crime novelists are anthropologists of evil, obliged to observe murderers from the outside, however valiantly they may try to empathise with them. Patricia Highsmith’s sociopathic killers, however, seem to come from within.

We know from her journals that in her 20s she became obsessed with a woman she had met briefly, stalking her and dwelling lovingly on the thought of killing her. “One wonders what would have happened to [Highsmith] if she had been unable to find the catharsis of fiction,” mused her fellow crime writer P D James. Might she have committed real murders if she had not sublimated her homicidal feelings into her books? One finds oneself, when faced with this hefty new collection of her short stories, issued to mark her centenary this week, calculating how many lives it may have saved.

Over and over in these 60-odd stories, we find people driven to murder, suicide or insanity, or all three. The uniformly hopeless law enforcers and psychiatrists hunt for motives and explanations, but rationalisation of people’s behaviour is anathema to Highsmith. She makes us realise that if, say, a man claims that he murdered a stranger in retaliation against the cruel universe that gave his son Down’s syndrome, then that is the beginning of a psychological mystery, not the end. As in her novels, Highsmith takes her dislike of stultifying social conventions to its logical conclusion, by seeming frankly to approve of murder.

One story features an 11-year-old boy with an interest in aberrant psychology – “The people in the case histories did what they wanted to do. They were natural. Nobody bossed them” – who rebels against his controlling mother by stabbing her to death. It’s the argument Ripley uses to justify himself – that a murderer is a free spirit among the cowed folk who suppress their instincts instead of rebelling against the overbearing forces of law and order.

Highsmith’s is not a notably just universe, except where cruelty to animals is concerned; three people come to a sticky end in the course of this book after mistreating cats, and an elephant, a pig, a barnful of battery chickens and a horde of snails. One story is narrated by a cockroach, perhaps the most contented and amiable character in the whole Highsmith oeuvre.

The odd human is granted happiness too, notably a young woman who discovers that going on dates with imaginary men is far preferable to the real thing. From the first (and previously unpublished) story in this book, which Highsmith wrote for her school magazine aged 15, marriage is invariably an obstacle to contentment; she is often at her funniest when writing about marital disharmony, being particularly ingenious in her ideas for how spouses might cunningly spoil each other’s harmless hobbies.

This volume contains roughly half the short stories Highsmith wrote, arranged chronologically so that we can see how the self-consciously literary style and careful eschewing of melodrama in her early work gives way to her characteristic method of relating lurid events in a scrupulously flat, affectless voice, resulting in a deliciously discomfiting sense of amorality. One alarming consequence of reading the stories in order is that about halfway through the settings switch abruptly from the US to places like Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds (Highsmith lived in England in the 1960s). I had the terrifying sensation that some safely exotic malign phenomenon – like a typhoon, say – was now making its way inexorably towards me.

It was a pleasurable sort of terror, needless to say, and the genius of Highsmith lies not just in her rare ability to evoke evil and misery, but in her capacity for making it moreish, so that one never tires of her cynicism and bleakness, even over 600 pages. Reading her is like having a devil on your shoulder arguing that decency and good citizenship are boring and cowardly, and so compellingly that you’ve acquiesced before you know it.

Under a Dark Angel's Eye by Patricia Highsmith is published by Virago at £20. Buy from the Telegraph Bookshop for £16.99