Signed Patricia Highsmith Books: Edith's Diary, People Who Knock on the Door and Found in the Street

As I mentioned in my post the other week on a significant (to me, if no one else) piece of signed Patriciaphernalia relating to Ripley's Game, I also have several signed Patricia Highsmith first and other editions I've been meaning to blog about for bloody ages – which, in order of publication, are as follows:

A 1977 Heinemann first edition of Edith's Diary, Highsmith's seventeenth novel. I've blogged in brief before about a previous copy of this edition, bought in 2010 in the Chichester branch of Kim's Bookshop (which, I've only just learned, closed down last year, though the Arundel branch still seemingly prospers) and subsequently sold to, I think, my friend Ric, co-proprietor of Lewes's fine (and pretty much only these days) secondhand and antiquarian bookshop Bow Windows. (And in a pleasing instance of serendipity, just the other day Ric drew my attention to Elena Gosalvez Blanca's piece about her time as Highsmith's assistant, in which Blanca highlights Edith's Diary as her favourite Highsmith.) This copy, however, is signed on the title page:

And dated 21 November 1988, a good decade on from publication. What Highsmith was up to on that particular day I couldn't say – while I own Edith's Diary, I don't own Highsmith's Her Diaries and Notebooks, if that day is even mentioned in there – but Andrew Wilson's 2003 biography Beautiful Shadow suggests she might have been in America, where this copy came from. Evidently whatever she was doing included signing a book, and three years earlier, around summer 1985, Highsmith was also signing books:

Namely the first American edition of her nineteenth novel, People Who Knock on the Door, published by Penzler Books in a numbered, limited, signed edition in September 1985:

One of half a dozen of Highsmith's works published by Penzler in signed limited editions, this is another book I've blogged about before (again back in 2010) in its 1983 Heinemann first edition, when I was in the process of securing firsts of as many Highsmiths as I could. And would you believe it I've blogged about the final book I'm showcasing before too, although not this particular edition:

An uncorrected advance proof of Found in the Street, Highsmith's twenty-first novel, published in the US in 1987 (the year after the UK Heinemann first edition) by Atlantic Monthly Press, with whom Highsmith signed after Otto Penzler dropped her dedication to "the Palestinian people and their leaders" from the above-showcased US edition of People Who Knock on the Door. This one I can state with reasonable certainty when and where it was signed, as it's an association copy originally belonging to Greg Gatenby, founding artistic director of the Toronto International Festival of Authors; his ownership signature can be seen on the half-title page above Highsmith's signature:

In October 1987 Highsmith was a guest at the festival, where she was interviewed for Sight & Sound magazine by film critic Gerald Peary, who noted what a coup her appearance was. According to Andrew Wilson, on 20 October, as part of her festival duties, Highsmith read from Found in the Street at Toronto's Harbourfront – and that locale, I would hazard, is where this proof of the US edition was signed.

Patriciaphernalia: A Signed Patricia Highsmith Letter Regarding Ripley's Game

I've a number of Patricia Highsmith signed books I've been meaning to blog about for bloody ages – years in fact – but the demands of work and life have meant that my blogging activity has largely been restricted to whichever books I've written or edited myself. However, I'm hoping to make more time for Existential Ennui besides simply blogging about whichever project I'm working on – case in point being my post the other day on Patrick Gierth – and have every intention of getting to those signed Highsmiths soon (and adding them to my dedicated Patricia Highsmith page). First, though, I want to showcase something even more remarkable:

A note Highsmith wrote on 9 February, 1975, regarding her "third Tom Ripley" as she puts it – in other words, 1974's Ripley's Game. The third in Highsmith's five-book Ripliad, Ripley's Game is, as I've noted many, many times, my favourite novel, not just of hers but full stop. I've never managed to secure a signed edition – though I do own a 1974 US Knopf first with an owner inscription by James Bond/Ian Fleming biographer John Pearson – so when I saw this note offered for sale I knew I had to have it so I could pair it with my 1974 Heinemann first edition of Ripley's Game (the book which began my book-collecting odyssey).

Addressed from Highsmith's then-residence in the village of Moncourt, France, where she wrote both Ripley's Game and the next book in the Ripliad, 1980's The Boy Who Followed Ripley (a signed US edition of which I blogged about back in 2017), the note is penned in response to a missive from one Peter Ladkin. An inveterate letter writer judging by the number of other examples of his author letters offered for sale at the same time (he also corresponded with the philosopher and LSE Professor John Watkins), Mr. Ladkin had evidently written approvingly of Ripley's Game, eliciting the following response from Highsmith:

Dear Mr Ladkin,

Don't worry about sending me the cost of return postage. I thank you very much for your remarks about my work and am glad you enjoyed my third Tom Ripley.

Yours sincerely

Patricia Highsmith

As the mention of "return postage" suggests, Mr. Ladkin had also seemingly requested Highsmith's signature and an accompanying inscription, which she duly supplied on a separate piece of paper, presumably so it could be used as a bookplate:

So there we have it: two notes regarding Ripley's Game, written from the house where Patricia Highsmith wrote that novel. Quite the pair of pieces of Patriciaphernalia for a Highsmith/Ripley's Game obsessive like myself.

A Ripley's Game Reprise: 1974 US Knopf First Edition of Patricia Highsmith's Third Tom Ripley Novel

What scant posts there have been on here of late have been to do with comics – those are, after all, what have been preoccupying me both personally and professionally over the past year or so – but I have been picking up the odd book here and there too, and among those have been a number by another perennial preoccupation of mine, Patricia Highsmith. Just the other day I came into possession of this:

An American first edition of Ripley's Game, published by Knopf in 1974, dust jacket design by Janet Halverson (whose other jackets include the 1970 and 1978 US firsts of Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt and The Human Factor, and the 1981 US first of Ross Thomas's The Mordida Man). You may recall... actually at this point I doubt anyone recalls anything I've written on Existential Ennui, but anyway: Ripley's Game, the third book in the Ripliad (soon to become a TV show, with Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley – intriguing and encouraging casting there), is not only my favourite Highsmith novel, but my favourite novel full stop, and it was the acquisition of a 1974 Heinemann first a dozen years ago (in a long-since-vanished Cecil Court bookshop) that first got me into book collecting. As such, it's a totemic book for me.

I had my eye on a Knopf first six years ago, but it slipped through my fingers (as compensation I settled instead for a 1989 Heinemann Uniform Edition). The notion of getting my filthy mitts on a Knopf (ooer) has floated in and out of my head ever since then, but just the other day it seemed the fates had finally aligned when I was in Lewes's Bow Windows Bookshop and co-proprietor (and friend of mine) Ric mentioned he'd come into possession of one as part of a box of books – mostly crime fiction and spy fiction – he'd bought from a local. Or at least he thought he had: when we looked in said box, there was no sign of Ripley's Game. Bugger.

I'd pretty much resigned myself to the fact that once again the Knopf first had eluded my grasp when two days later Ric sent me a message saying he'd found it. And it turned out that not only was it a first edition (not a later printing – the Knopf edition went through a few), but it was once owned by local author John Pearson, he of James Bond: The Authorized Biography and The Life of Ian Fleming fame.

So I'm very happy with my copy (even though the dust jacket is a little battered: the sign of a well-read book, whether by Mr. Pearson or whoever it was Ric bought it off – and quite right too), not least because it affords me the opportunity to compare the US and UK first editions. The text in the Knopf edition, which was published in May of '74, a few months after the Heinemann edition, has been Americanised, or I suppose – depending on whether Highsmith, who was American, wrote the manuscript in American English – re-Americanised: within the first few sentences, there's a "parlor game" as opposed to "parlour game" in the Heinemann edition.

The Knopf has deckled edges, as is often the case with American editions, and a red-stained top block. I also rather like the jacket flap description of Tom Ripley as "energetic, amoral, overcivilized" and "undersensitized".

Now I suppose I'll have to write something abut the other Highsmith books I've picked up – especially as they're all signed.

The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories by Patricia Highsmith: Signed First Edition

Two years ago I wrote about Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith and Eleven, Highsmith's first collection of short stories, published by Heinemann in 1970. I hadn't expected to return to Eleven; as well as exploring in that post Highsmith and Greene's mutual admiration and the foreword he wrote for the book, I also reviewed the best stories contained therein, so there wasn't really much more I could have added. But then I went and bought this:

the American first edition of the collection, published by Doubleday in 1970 under the title The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories, with a dust jacket designed by Tim Lewis, and, well, here we are. There are no significant differences between the Heinemann and Doubleday editions – both contain the same eleven short stories; both boast the Graham Greene foreword (although it's titled 'Introduction' in the American edition) – so there's no excuse, really, for my buying the US first edition when I already owned the UK first edition... except that this copy of the US first edition is signed:

Curiously, it's also an ex-library copy, liberated from, according to the indented stamp on the title page, the Westbrook Memorial Library in Maine (I think; it's hard to make out and the library docket that was affixed to the rear endpaper has been removed). I'm guessing that's the Walker Memorial Library. The signature looks genuine to me, but I am intrigued as to the circumstances by which Highsmith signed a library book. Was it signed after it was removed from the library? Or while it resided in the library, during a reading or event of some kind – or perhaps even covertly during an incognito visit by Highsmith...? I don't suppose I'll ever know.

At least, that's what I figured when I first posted this. But then an hour or two later Book Glutton emailed me and drew my attention to this 2015 obituary for Bonny Muir. As Book Glutton noted, Muir was a good friend of Patricia Highsmith's who at one time lived in Portland, Maine, not far from Westbrook. An avid user of the South Portland Library, it's conceivable Muir frequented the Walker Memorial Library too, and that she acquired this copy of The Snail-Watcher there and got Highsmith to sign it at a later date. Then, when Muir died, her books were sold. Conjecture, of course, but it's plausible, and certainly excellent detective work on the part of Book Glutton.

Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 20/1/17.

Signed Inscribed Tom Ripley Books: Patricia Highsmith's Ripley Under Ground and The Boy Who Followed Ripley

I'm of a mind to post some of the signed books I've acquired over the past year or two – at least, I'm of a mind as I type this; whether or not I'll remain of a mind to do so, or indeed retain any enthusiasm for blogging whatsoever, remains to be seen. For now, though, here's a pair of signed Patricia Highsmith books, both of which are novels in my abiding obsession, the Tom Ripley series.

On the left is a 1970 US Doubleday Book Club Edition of Ripley Under Ground, the second novel in the five-book Ripliad, and on the right a 1980 US Lippincott & Crowell first edition of The Boy Who Followed Ripley, the fourth novel in the Ripliad. The dust jacket design on Ripley Under Ground is by Alex Gotfryd, while the dust jacket design on The Boy Who Followed Ripley is by Pat Voehl.

Ripley Under Ground has been signed, inscribed ("Best to you") and dated (19 May 1981) by Patricia Highsmith on the half-title page – in pencil, unusually (every other signed Highsmith book I own – a dozen in total – has been signed in pen). As noted, it's a book club edition, which ordinarily would make it less interesting to me, but it's the only signed copy of Ripley Under Ground – not just one of my favourite novels in the Ripliad but one of my favourite Highsmiths, and therefore one of my favourite novels, full stop – in any edition I've ever come across, so it's a remarkable thing indeed.

The Boy Who Followed Ripley is an association copy, signed by Highsmith on the front free endpaper and inscribed to Lou Kannenstine – or rather "Kannenstein", as Highmith has misspelled it. Kannenstine, who died in 2014, was the publisher of Foul Play Press, an imprint of Countryman Press which issued crime and mystery novels by, among others, Reginald Hill, Max Allan Collins and another abiding preoccupation of mine, Donald E. Westlake (the three Grofield novels written as Richard Stark).

I've added both books to the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery (under 'Patriciaphernalia'), where my inscribed association copy of the fifth Ripley novel, Ripley Under Water, also resides – meaning I now own three-fifths of the Ripliad in signed editions (two copies in the case of Ripley Under Water). And if the mood takes me, I'll be posting some other signed Highsmiths soon.

Blimey I Wrote a Book

Actually I wrote two books... and co-wrote another book... and wrote a bit of another book... and wrote an essay for another book... so I guess in total that adds up to, what, two-and-a-half books or something? All in the space of less than a year. Which, when added to all the writing I've done for the Marvel Fact Files and The Walking Dead: The Official Magazine and the stack of books and graphic novels I've edited over the past however many months – more on those below – might go some way towards explaining why there's been bugger all happening on Existential Ennui of late.

But anyway: the books wot I wrote. The two books written entirely by me will be published spring next year: Guardians of the Galaxy: The Ultimate Guide to the Cosmic Outlaws, and Guardians of the Galaxy Ultimate Sticker Collection (the attentive might be able to spot a common theme there). Doubtless I'll be banging on about those nearer the time. The book I co-wrote (and did a fair amount of editing on), alongside fellow authors Billy Wrecks and Danny Graydon, is out now:

The Mysterious World of Doctor Strange, published by DK – an official guide to Marvel Comics' Sorcerer Supreme (soon to be seen, in the form of Benedict Cumberbatch, in cinemas in Marvel's Doctor Strange movie). I got my copy the other day and it's a handsome thing: a hardback with gilt-edged pages, beautifully designed by Amazing15 and DK's Chris Gould, lavishly illustrated with panels and splash pages from across Doctor Strange's fifty-plus year comics career – and the writing's not bad either. It's aimed at kids, but I'll wager the more mature comics fan will find it diverting too (being one myself). Review here.

Also out now is the all-new edition of the DC Comics Encyclopaedia, which I wrote a bit of and did a fair bit of editing on. I haven't seen a finished copy of that one yet, but according to reports it's a great big beast of a book. Review here.

And out later in the year is Murder in the Closet, an anthology of essays examining queer themes in crime fiction that I contributed a piece on Patricia Highsmith to. I haven't seen a copy of that one either, but editor Curtis Evans has chosen some intriguing and sterling contributors (present company excepted, of course), so it should be a fascinating book.

Besides that little lot, I've edited a whole heap of other books and graphic novels over the past year or so:

Top to bottom in that towering pile are Pen and Ink by James Hobbs; Electri_city: The Dusseldorf School of Electronic Music by Rudi Esch; Who Are You? The Life and Death of Keith Moon by Jim McCarthy and Marc Olivent; 5-Minute Sketching: People by Pete Scully; 5-Minute Sketching: Architecture by Liz Steel; Essential Type by Tony Seddon; Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor Archives Vols 1–3; Independence Day: The Original Movie Adaptation; Elric Volume 3: The Dreaming City; and Battle Classics Volume 2. There's others besides, I'm sure, plus books and graphic novels I've proofread rather than edited, but I've either filed them away and forgotten what they are or they've not been published yet.

So that's what I've been up to. And who knows? Maybe at some point I'll find time to blog about some of the books I've bought as well...

Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (Pan, 1968)

No. 9 in a series of posts on books I've bought but haven't got round to blogging about properly – indeed may never get round to blogging about properly – so this will have to do. NB: linked in this Friday's Forgotten Books roundup.

What is it?
The 1968 first Pan paperback printing of Patricia Highsmith's 1950 debut, Strangers on a Train.

Who designed the cover?
I'm not sure, but from the mid- to late-1960s (and onwards) Pan's covers changed from being largely illustrative in nature to largely photographic, at the behest, according to the Pan Paperback Collectors site, of editor David Larkin, so it's likely Larkin had something to do with it. The same styling, incidentally – a photo of a collection of objects to do with the novel's plot – can be seen on the 1967 Pan printings of Highsmith's The Glass Cell and A Suspension of Mercy.

Where and when did I buy it?
I didn't. My mum bought it in, I believe, a charity shop, and gave it to me when she last visited a couple of weeks ago.

Why did my mum buy it?
To read it; like me she's a Highsmith admirer, although she didn't get on with this one. Mind you, it's by no means my favourite Highsmith either, even among the non-Ripley books. Still, as Highsmith's debut, and arguably the template for much of her work, Strangers on a Train is an important novel in the writer's oeuvre, and certainly deserves its own dedicated post on Existential Ennui, something that, remarkably given my Highsmith obsession, it hasn't had heretofore.

Have I read it yet?
I have, a few years back, in its 1952 Corgi first British paperback edition.

The Ten Best Books I Read in 2015

For this, my final post of the year, I present the ten best books I read in 2015. As has been the case with every one of my year-end books top tens since I started assembling such things six years ago, barely any of the books in this year's top ten were actually published this year – in fact just one, by an author who in 2013's top ten was the sole representative of that year's new publishing too – and so this post will as usual be of absolutely no use to anyone in discerning the prevailing trends in publishing over the past twelve months. But it may be of some use in discerning the prospective trends on Existential Ennui over the coming months, in as much as I've yet to get round to reviewing just under half of the books in this top ten – nor a good number of the books in my big long list of the books I read in 2015, from whence this top ten is drawn – and so whatever prolix piffle I eventually manage to cobble together about them may well form the substance of at least some of Existential Ennui in 2016.

Unless of course I decide not to blog about any of them. Or indeed blog at all. Merry Christmas, and a happy new year!

10. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene (Heinemann, 1958)

Informed by Graham Greene's experiences working for the Secret Service during the war, Our Man in Havana may be a fairly frothy confection (the fate of poor Dr. Hasselbacher aside) but it still effectively skewers what Greene perceived as the credulity of British Intelligence. "It seemed to me that either the Foreign Office or the Intelligence Service had amply merited a little ridicule," he wrote of the novel in Ways of Escape. Speaking of which...

9. Ways of Escape by Graham Greene (Bodley Head, 1980)

Part autobiography, part travelogue, Greene's book-by-book saunter down memory lane is not only illuminating as to the origins of many of his novels, short stories and plays (the background to, and inspiration for, The Quiet American, for example, is extensive, incorporating diary entries) but frequently arresting and eye-opening too, not least when he discusses his fondness for opium, marijuana and cocaine.

8. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Picador, 2014)

I noted in my top ten of the best graphic novels I read in 2015 that I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic dystopias, and Station Eleven is a fine example of the sub-genre – elegantly written, strangely uplifting and with a fascinating and compelling internal mythology (as evidenced by the one-page Dr. Eleven comic book insert in my copy of the first edition).

7. The Holm Oaks by P. M. Hubbard (Joseph, 1965)

In my review of The Holm Oaks I ventured that it "might be the quintessential Hubbard novel", and further suggested that "the novel could almost be seen as a prototypical eco thriller". True to form I neglected to say whether it's any good or not, but its appearance in this top ten should offer some guidance there.

6. Eleven by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1970)

Graham Greene – who, as is becoming clear, features heavily in this top ten (to paraphrase New Order, everything went Greene for me this year) – wrote in his foreword to Eleven that Highsmith in her short stories "is after the quick kill rather than the slow encirclement of the reader, and how admirably and with what field-craft she hunts us down". Quite so.

= 5. private i / Foreign Exchange by Jimmy Sangster (Triton, 1967 / 1968)

I think Hammer Horror-meister Jimmy Sangster's two spy/crime thrillers starring ex-British Intelligence operative turned private investigator John Smith might have been the most purely enjoyable novels I read in 2015 – "kind of early le Carré crossed with Len Deighton's unnamed working class secret agent and with a dash of Adam Hall's Quiller mixed in for good measure", as I put it in my review.

4. A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, 2015)

A companion novel to Life After Life, A God in Ruins is as evocative in its own way of life during wartime as Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear (about which more shortly); but it's also a beautiful – and beautifully written – meditation on the big stuff of existence: love, death, family, chance, choice.

3. Carol by Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsbury, 1990)

"If [Todd] Haynes's film brings [Carol] and Highsmith to a new audience, so much the better, because Carol deserves to be widely read, especially by those who might otherwise dismiss Highsmith as a crime writer," I wrote in my review, adding that "it's recognisably the work of the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), This Sweet Sickness (1960) and The Cry of the Owl (1962), and as good in its own way as any of those novels". Still haven't seen the blummin' film yet though.

2. Touch by Elmore Leonard (Viking, 1988)

I was surprised by how great Touch was; it's such an overlooked novel in Leonard's backlist that I wasn't expecting it to be up there with the likes of The Big Bounce (1969), Unknown Man No. 89 (1977), Split Images (1981), Stick (1983) or LaBrava (1983). But it really is that good, boasting among its scenes "a climactic, brilliant, farcical TV interview conducted by a rictus grinning hairpiece-bedecked towering shit of a host which is about the best sequence I've read in a Leonard novel", as I put it in my review.

1. The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene (Heinemann, 1946/1960)

When I reviewed The Ministry of Fear in July I praised the novel's "unexpected depth" and Greene's "vivid evocation of London during the Blitz, penned while the bombs were falling"; I highlighted the "undercurrent of pain and suffering which weaves through the story" and the themes of "the spirit of adventure and the loss of innocence" that inform the narrative; and I stated in closing "that The Ministry of Fear is the best of Greene's novels that I've read... and by far the best book that I've read this year". Couldn't have put it better myself.

Patricia Highsmith's Ripley Under Water: Signed Inscribed Association Copy (Bloomsbury, 1991)

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 2/10/15.

In September 1991, Patricia Highsmith travelled from her home in Tegna, Switzerland, to London in order to publicise her latest book, Ripley Under Water – her third for Bloomsbury (following 1987's Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes and 1990's Carol) and the last to be published in her lifetime (a final novel, Small G: A Summer Idyll, was published shortly after her death in 1995). One of her publicity engagements was an interview before an audience at the ICA on 27 September, conducted by the crime writer Michael Dibdin – since made available on the British Library website (archiver, incidentally, of Existential Ennui). Later that evening Highsmith signed copies of the Bloomsbury first edition of Ripley Under Water at the late lamented Murder One on Charing Cross Road (and again the following day at Waterstones in Earls Court); but at some point on the day before, 26 September, she inscribed, signed and dated a copy of the book to her publisher, Liz Calder. This copy:

Which I acquired from Suffolk bookseller Claude Cox, and which came with an accompanying letter of provenance, signed by Liz Calder, on Full Circle Editions headed paper – Full Circle being the Suffolk publishing house Calder established in 2009 – the year after she left Bloomsbury – with her husband, Louis Baum, and Genevieve and John Christie.

I wrote about Ripley Under Water, the final novel in the Ripliad, back in 2013 as part of the Great Tom Ripley Reread, when I got my hands on a 1991 London Limited Edition of the book, flat signed by Highsmith. I mentioned then how as a Highsmith and Ripley enthusiast – okay, fanatic – "owning a signed Ripley novel is quite something"; so to have now come into possession of a signed association copy of a Ripley novel – even though it be the same Ripley novel, albeit in a (slightly) different edition – inscribed to such a key figure in Highsmith's life, is properly thrilling. (The book wasn't too expensive either, certainly in comparison to another association copy of Ripley Under Water currently listed on AbeBooks, a 1992 US Knopf edition inscribed to a literary agent and priced at around £250.)

In her accompanying letter, Liz Calder states that she "met Patricia Highsmith during the last years of her life and published several of her books", making note of the time "Highsmith came to London for publication" of Ripley Under Water and how Highsmith "was a gravel-voiced, quite shy but darkly funny woman who loved whisky and cats". Writing in The Oldie the month after Highsmith's death (March 1995 issue, as quoted in Andrew Wilson's 2003 biography of Highsmith, Beautiful Shadow), Calder recalled that publicity trip to London, when Highsmith stayed at Hazlitt's Hotel on Frith Street, Soho:

I collected her there for an evening on the town, and she had discovered that so crooked were the floors that her whisky bottle slid of its own accord down the top of her chest of drawers and she was catching it with glee as it flew off the edge. She kept repeating this trick a bit like Pooh and his balloon. She had a childlike pleasure in simple things.

Ripley Under Water is not the best Tom Ripley novel, nor my favourite (that would be 1974's Ripley's Game, in both cases), but I love the Ripliad as a body of work and Ripley Under Water is an intrinsic part of that series – a sequel of sorts to the second Ripley novel, Ripley Under Ground (1970), with a handful of excellent and memorable sequences which are the equal of anything else in the Ripliad (Tom luring his nemesis, David Pritchard, to a secluded seaside Tangier cafe and then losing his rag with Pritchard and beating him up; Tom and Ed Banbury's gruesome disposal of the remains of the art dealer Murchison; the final fate of David and Janice Pritchard). So I'm delighted to add to my Highsmith collection a unique signed copy of the novel, and especially one with so firm – and firmly dated, not to mention located – a provenance.

I'll be showcasing some more inscribed books over the coming weeks – not by Highsmith, although I do have a couple of other signed books by her I'll be unveiling at some point – but by other authors, some of whom have appeared on Existential Ennui before, and some who have not.

Patricia Highsmith on Writing, in Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense & Spy Fiction and Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books by H. R. F. Keating

By far the most sustained piece of writing by Patricia Highsmith on the subject of fiction – her own and others' – can be found in her 160-page (in its 1981 revised edition) guidebook Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (orig. 1966). But Highsmith did pen the occasional piece for other publications too, both magazines (Plotting itself grew out of an article Highsmith wrote for The Writer magazine, and in 1989 she wrote an article for Granta magazine on the subject of Tom Ripley) and books (the 1990 Bloomsbury edition of Carol includes an afterword on the genesis of that novel). In the 1980s she twice contributed to books edited and written by the crime writer and critic H. R. F. Keating – Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense & Spy Fiction (Windward, 1982) and Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books (Xanadu, 1987) – and both pieces are well worth a look.

Her piece for Whodunit, "Not-Thinking with the Dishes" in the "How I Write My Books" chapter, isn't very long – barely a page in length – but it's still revealing as regards her methods. Noting that she had "no set of rules for writing a book" and that she "never think[s] about who my readers may be", she states: "My book ideas begin with a situation of surprise or coincidence, some unusual circumstance, and around this, and forward and backward, I create a narrative with a beginning and an end." She continues:

I like to write three or four hours a day, taking a break frequently to do something such as finishing the last dishes in the sink, during which I am not-thinking about my work in progress. It is important that nobody else be in the house. Then my thoughts take a creative jump. Hard thought never did me very much good. I believe in letting one's mind alone. The only price I pay is having to rewrite, but not always a lot and mostly it is polishing, and having to cut a fair amount.

To illustrate this last point, Whodunit? reproduces a manuscript page from People Who Knock on the Door, which at that juncture hadn't been published (it was published by Heinemann the following year). Highsmith additionally reveals that she could write up to two thousand words a day, worked seven days a week ("In principle... something always happens to prevent work one or two days a week") and that she was unable to "adopt the method of a famous writer who said he writes the action parts first and fills in the gaps later" but instead had to "write all the in-between material as I go". She reasons: "Maybe this is inevitable because of the subjective attitude I generally take: I describe what is in the head of the protagonist, psychopath or not, because what is in his or her head must explain as well as advance the story."

Whodunit? itself is a thoroughly worthwhile book – there are essays by, among others, Michael Gilbert, John Gardner ("The Espionage Novel"), Gregory Mcdonald, Len Deighton and Eric Ambler, as well as writer-by-writer and character-by-character guides to crime fiction and thrillers – as is Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books, in which H. R. F. Keating offers a hundred two-page essays on key crime novels and their authors (the list can be found at Classic Crime Fiction). Highsmith penned the foreword to the book, in which she appears to demonstrate more of a working knowledge of the field than she suggested she had in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (she maintained in that book that she "seldom read" other people's crime novels). She singles out, among others, Wilkie Collins, Raymond Chandler, P. D. James, Cornell Woolrich, Georges Simenon and, especially gratifyingly for me, P. M. Hubbard (albeit only in passing), and picks over Keating's musings on these and other authors.

"One can open The 100 Best anywhere," Highsmith writes at the close of her foreword, "and be entertained by its contents, learn something new, or reinforce what is already in one's head." Not least in regard to Highsmith herself: Keating includes both The Tremor of Forgery (1969) – highlighting the "uneasiness" and "Fuzziness, ambiguity" of Highsmith's writing and "the to-and-fro indecisiveness of real life" she captures – and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), where he details the traits which make Tom Ripley such a compelling and, yes, charming character – "his genuine love of art and his true appreciation of the fruits of the earth... the simple affection he feels for his friends... his real interest in the earth-loving pursuit of gardening" and our "awed admiration" at "his willingness to take risks". He also recalls "a meeting of the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger award where one of our number announced that if we chose Ripley's Game for the prize she would resign".

Both Whodunit? and Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books are fairly readily – and cheaply – available (I found both for a few quid each in Colin Page Antiquarian Books in Brighton – where there is also, at time of writing, an expanded selection of secondhand crime fiction – a recently acquired collection, one which, needless to say, I've already raided). Not so the next Patricia Highsmith book I'll be blogging about: a signed association copy of the final novel in the Ripliad.

Carol by Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsbury, 1990); Orig. The Price of Salt by Claire Morgan (Coward-McCann, 1952): Book Review

To flick through the 'other books by' pages of Patricia Highsmith first editions from the 1950s to the late 1980s, one would be forgiven for assuming that her second published novel was The Blunderer (1954 US/1956 UK). In fact her second novel was The Price of Salt, published under the nom de plume Claire Morgan in 1952 (by Coward-McCann in the US, after Harper & Bros, publishers of Highsmith's 1950 debut, Strangers on a Train, rejected it) so as to avoid Highsmith becoming labelled, as she later put it, "a lesbian-book writer". It took until 1990 for the novel to finally emerge from the closet and become an authorised part of her backlist when it was reissued as Carol by Diogenes in Switzerland and Bloomsbury in the UK (both editions featuring Tolouse-Lautrec's L'abandon, les deux amies on the cover), Highmith having at long last been persuaded to publish it under her own name.

Which isn't to say that the book hadn't been tremendously successful under its prior author name and title. In a new afterword to the novel printed in the Bloomsbury edition of Carol (recently made available in edited form on The Telegraph website), Highsmith revealed how after gaining "some serious and respectable reviews when it appeared in hardcover in 1952... the real success came a year later with the paperback edition [published by Bantam in the States], which sold nearly a million copies and was certainly read by more". She added: "The fan letters came in addressed to Claire Morgan, care of the paperback house. I remember receiving envelopes of ten and fifteen letters a couple of times a week for months on end."

The Price of Salt was reprinted by Bantam at least four times in the years following its initial publication, and was reissued by Macfadden-Bartell in the US in 1969 and again by Naiad Press in 1984. Each time it was published under the Claire Morgan alias (despite the best efforts of the publishers), and though word had begun to circulate as to the true identity of Claire Morgan long before Bloomsbury published Carol, the arrival of the retitled edition under Highsmith's own name was sufficient to prompt a wave of publicity, including newspaper interviews and a television appearance (on BBC 2's The Late Show, whose Sarah Dunant – according to Highsmith's biographer, Andrew Wilson – called the new edition "a literary coming out").

Doubtless there'll be another surge of interest in the novel in the run-up to the release of Todd Haynes's Rooney Mara/Cate Blanchett-starring film adaptation (which was praised by the critics at Cannes in May); already this year there have been articles on Highsmith in The Guardian and the Daily Mail. If Haynes's film brings the book and Highsmith to a new audience, so much the better, because Carol deserves to be widely read, especially by those who might otherwise dismiss Highsmith as a crime writer.

The story of a romance between Therese, a young shop assistant at a New York department store, and Carol, a well-to-do housewife whom Therese serves a few days before Christmas, the novel has its basis in a fleeting encounter Highsmith had with "a blondish woman in a fur coat" when Highsmith, like Therese, was working in the toy department of a store (Bloomingdale's, as opposed to the novel's fictional Frankenberg's) in December 1948. The woman bought a doll for her daughter, left her address for delivery and departed, but this seemingly ordinary episode left Highsmith feeling "odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, yet at the same time uplifted, as if I had seen a vision". That evening at home, Highsmith wrote out an eight-page outline for The Price of Salt. (In his 2003 biography of Highsmith, Beautiful Shadow, Andrew Wilson identified the woman as Kathleen Senn, and discovered that she had committed suicide in 1951, a fact of which Highsmith was unaware.)

Informed by Highsmith's love affairs with married middle class socialites like Virginia Kent Catherwood and Kathryn Hamill Cohen (wife of Dennis Cohen, the founder of the Cresset Press, British publishers of Strangers on a Train and later The Blunderer and The Talented Mr. Ripley), the novel is a relatively straightforward account of the relationship that develops between Therese and the older, more sophisticated Carol. In that sense it's an atypical book in the Highsmith canon, but in its unflinching portrayal of romantic infatuation and with its measured yet compulsive pacing and what Anthony Price called "the unpretentious simplicity of the Highsmith prose" – and yet still complex in the way it communicates the inner turmoil of Therese (the novel's point-of-view character) – it's recognisably the work of the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), This Sweet Sickness (1960) and The Cry of the Owl (1962), and as good in its own way as any of those novels.

It's unlikely I'll ever be able to afford a 1952 Coward-McCann first edition of The Price of Salt, pictured above; those run into the thousands of pounds. Thankfully British first editions of the novel – i.e. the 1990 Bloomsbury edition of Carol – are rather more reasonably priced; I picked up the copy illustrating this post for £3.50 in Oxfam Books in Bloomsbury, appropriately enough, and copies can be had online for around a tenner. I've added my one to the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery (where an uncorrected proof of the Bloomsbury edition can also be found) – and I'll have more on Highsmith and Bloomsbury (as in the publisher) soon.*

NB: This post linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 25/9/15.

* Update, 30/3/16: A couple of months after I posted this, I sold my copy of the Bloomsbury first edition on eBay for over £30, which is probably a better indication of the going rate for a first in the wake of the Carol film. Decent copies of the Bloomsbury first are in shorter supply these days too... although not in as short supply as the Bloomsbury proof of Carol, where there are at present no copies for sale online. Fortunately I kept my one.