You don’t know this about me but I’m a murderer. At least that’s what the brilliant, talented, queer novelist Patricia Highsmith, who was born 100 years ago, may well have called me.
Why, would Highsmith renowned for her novel “Strangers on a Train” and other psychological thrillers, have said this of me? Because, I confess, I’ve eaten snails, smothered, so to speak, in garlic and butter.
Highsmith, a misanthrope, gave us in her fiction Tom Ripley, the world’s most charming, but murderous sociopath. Yet, she (seriously) believed that you were a murderer if you ate snails.
Welcome to the world of Patricia Highsmith! Few writers are as popular, well regarded or more embedded in pop culture than Highsmith, who lived from 1921 to 1995.