“I’ve been fending off would-be biographers for a while. Why can’t they wait until I’m dead?” So asks Patricia Highsmith in Jill Dawson’s fictional biography, The Crime Writer. Dawson has waited until 22 years after Highsmith’s death to pen her imagined account of the time she spent in Suffolk, in 1964, attempting both to write a book and escape her fans.
The novel follows Highsmith’s affair with Sam, a married woman and mother, who Pat doesn’t believe will ever leave her husband and child (“Love was a kind of madness, not very logical”). In spite of Pat’s retreat to the countryside, she is being pursued on two fronts: by persistent young journalist Virginia Smythson-Balby, whose intentions, both professional and romantic, Pat is suspicious of; and by a stalker whose existence no one else takes seriously.
Dawson recreates the atmosphere of paranoia, obsession and suspense for which Highsmith’s novels are renowned. There are extended riffs on the psychology of murderers, the motivations of writers, and the legitimacy of one kind of killing over another: “Murder is a tricky thing… One time or place illegal, unthinkable; another time, another place, not.”
Pat’s vulnerability is both compelling and unnerving. Dawson portrays a woman who needs to be noticed yet is desperate for solitude: “The men would have assessed her at once as attractive but not young, and not game, and with that appraisal over, her invisibility would be assured.” Friendships are approached cautiously, and even with the closest relationships, concealment is a given: “If secrets existed between them it was because they didn’t know how to tell them.”
Pat’s fractured sense of self, as teased out by Dawson through the course of the novel, stems back to her relationship with her mother and her stepfather, Stanley: “I must have been a horrible, dreadful, monstrous, evil child to be so violently unloved.” It is the memories of Pat’s childhood, and the present-day scenes with her mother, that prove to be among the most sinister passages. And while The Crime Writer suffers from an excess of introspection that causes the plot to falter, it is nonetheless a fascinating insight into the psychology of a writer.
• The Crime Writer by Jill Dawson is published by Sceptre (£8.99). To order a copy for £6.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
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