 Mystery: March 01, 2023 Issue [#11837] |
This week: March Mystery newsletter Edited by: Gratitude Adore ♥  
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This newsletter for the month of March is going to be not be in the cozy theme that we've visited since last fall but on a specific writer. I don't want to bore you themes that you might become used to seeing so we are leaving the cozy theme and returning to a single suspense writer by the name of Patricia Highsmith. She is the author of the acclaimed, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" series, along with 22 other notable works of fiction.
I found her works while perusing for an interesting mystery writer for this month. I don't think you will be disappointed. So with that, we'll move on to the March newsletter. |
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The month of March is only in a few days and well, we had a blizzard in our neck of the country (which feels pretty exciting) but it seems like alot of the country was hit by extreme snow. As I looked out in our snowy yard as the train the chugged by in my window view, I wondered how this newsletter would unfold. Which is how I stumbled across the writings of Patricia Highsmith, the author we will view this month.
Patricia Highsmith was an accomplished author, with many writing credits to her name, but let's just start with her beginning.
She was born January 19, 1921, in Fort Worth, Texas. She was an only child. Her parents, Jay Bernard Plangman, who was of German descent and Mary Coates Plangman. They divorced 10 days before Patricia was born. Her early life was difficult and her mother moved with her new husband, artist Stanley Highsmith to New York City. When Patricia was 12, her mother sent her to live for a year with her maternal grandmother. She has said, "this was the saddest year in my life", which seems to suggest that the relationship with her grandmother was an awful one. She dealt with abandonment issues with her mother, who told her at one time, "I tried to abort you by drinking turpentine" and this was a love-hate relationship that never saw resolution her whole life.
Patricia Highsmith set most of her novels in Greenwich Village, where she lived from 1940-1942. In 1942, she graduated from Barnard College where she studied playwriting, composition and short story prose. After graduating from college, and although she had endorsements from "highly placed professionals", she was unable get hired though she applied for jobs from Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Time, Fortune and others. Based in a recommendation she received from Truman Capote, she was accepted by the Yaddo artists retreat, where she attended in 1948 and began working on her novel, "Strangers on a Train."
Her first novel, "Strangers on a Train", is a novel where Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno are passengers on the same train. Haines is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno a mysterious smooth-talker with a sadistic proposal: he’ll murder Haines’s wife if Haines will murder Bruno’s father. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy finds himself trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, ordinary people are capable of extraordinary crimes. This story was made into an Alfred Hitchcock film adaptation in 1951 and was a success for that year.Strangers on a Train: A Novel: ($14.19 from Amazon.Com)
She had several books but the series that put her on the map was her series, "The Talented Mr. Ripley", the five book Ripley series that finds him newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan. Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game.Buy The Talented Mr. Ripley @ Amazon.Com!
Patricia Highsmith wrote four sequels: Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley's Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) and Ripley Under Water (1991), about Ripley's exploits as a con artist and serial killer who always gets away with his crimes. The series—collectively called "The Ripliad"—are some of Highsmith's most popular works.
She is the recipient of several awards and honors, such as the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll (special award), Mystery Writers of America, for The Talented Mr. Ripley in '56, Silver Dagger Award, Best Foreign Novel, Crime Writers' Association, for The Two Faces of January in '64 and Grand Master, Swedish Crime Writers' Academy in '79, among others. She left America and moved to Switzerland, though she retained her American citizenship and was bitter over the extra taxation this choice cost her.
She suffered with depression throughout her life, and never married. She died in Switzerland, four years after her mother died, from lung cancer and anaplastic anemia in 1995. She willed her estate to the artists school Yaddo where her literary journey began.
It is my hope that you found interest in this month's newsletter offering. Till next time, my dears!
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