Let’s not waste a moment. Miss Highsmith has been waiting a long time.

Patricia Highsmith (1921–95), who spent half her life outside the United States and saw her best works corralled into categories that couldn’t begin to account for their depth, their dazzle, and their direct attack on her readers, wrote six or seven of the darkest, most delinquent novels of the last half of the twentieth century.

At least two of them, Strangers on a Train (1950) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), are masterpieces of midcentury American fiction – and in the old-fashioned sense, too. They shed light and throw shade on the modalities, manners, moeurs, and psyches of profoundly transgressive, specifically American characters in ways that should have staked Highsmith’s claim to a corner of literature’s best back lot (strewn, now, with crumpled carbon paper, point-less fountain pens, and discarded typewriters) – the Great American Novel.