Book of a lifetime: Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith

From The Independent archive: Craig Brown sees in the reclusive novelist’s ‘psychopath heroes’ a writer who is deeply attuned to the strange rhythms of guilt, jealousy and fantasy that affect all of us in different ways

Patricia Highsmith and her classic fifth novel, published in 1957 (Getty/Harper & Brothers)

Staying in a house in Italy aged 19, having got to the end of a Henry James, I picked a paperback called Deep Water by a writer I had never heard of and read the first couple of sentences. “Vic didn’t dance, but not for the reasons that most men who don’t dance give to themselves. He didn’t dance simply because his wife liked to dance.”

Henry James it was not. But who could resist reading on? Back then, I had never read anyone quite like Patricia Highsmith: blunt, anxious, tense, paranoid, driven. Thirty-five years later, I still haven’t, though I have read any number of imitators.

After Deep Water, I read The Blunderer, and after The Blunderer, The Talented Mr Ripley. Vic, it emerged, is a prime example of what Highsmith fondly described as “my psychopath heroes”. They are driven to murder, and then have to live with the dread of being found out. If they have a forerunner, it is Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.