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There is a comfort zone in crime fiction that is for ever Agatha Christie. Think only of the demure but indomitable Miss Marple for assurance that, eventually, all will come right in a wicked world.
by Patricia Highsmith (Virago £20, 640 pp) It is a good rule never to judge a work of art by the character of the artist. Patricia Highsmith is a case in point. With the morals of an alley cat and cruel by nature, she was, nonetheless, one of the greatest crime writers of the last century. Nobody in a Highsmith story can be taken for granted. Common decency is a thin veneer easily cracked to release an undercurrent of depravity. While this collection of her short pieces, published to mark her centenary, starts gently with a marital dispute, we are soon on a voyage into the darker recesses of...