Patricia Highsmith – driven by a killer’s instincts

“A mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being … relentlessly ugly. … But her books? Brilliant.” So said Patricia Highsmith’s publisher. And PD James remarked that without the catharsis of fiction she wondered whether Highsmith might have become one of the murderers she wrote so lovingly about.  A new biography relating the chaos and degradation of her life and a collection of her short stories to mark her centenary don’t paint a pretty picture.&