The Haunts of Miss Highsmith
By Patricia Cohen, New York Times, Friday, Dec 11, 2009

Photo left -Librado Romero/The New York Times
48 Grove Street, site of Patricia Highsmith’s parents’ apartment.

Patricia Highsmith wrote 22 novels, many of them set in Greenwich Village, where she lived. But the landscape of Highsmith Country consists not only of the physical Village neighborhood, but also the dark and desperate territory of Highsmith’s psyche.

“She is our most Freudian novelist,” said Joan Schenkar, whose biography of Highsmith was released this week by St. Martin’s Press. Having spent nearly eight years on the book, “The Talented Miss Highsmith,” Ms. Schenkar is the perfect tour guide for this novelist’s world. Standing in front of the red-brick building at 35 Morton Street where the 19-year-old Highsmith took a summer sublet in 1940 to escape her mother and stepfather, Ms. Schenkar continued: “To her, love and death are closely related. She tends to murder people in her novels where she made love in real life.”

Morton Street was where Highsmith “started her lifelong career of aggressive seduction,” Ms. Schenkar explained. It is also where Kenneth Rowajinski, the psychopathic dog killer, is murdered in her 1972 novel “A Dog’s Ransom.” (The unlucky poodle, Tina, bears the name of a dog owned by one of her amours.) “She kills so many dogs,” Ms. Schenkar said of Highsmith. “She hated dogs. She couldn’t bear sharing attention.”

On this steel gray, rainy day — “perfect Highsmith weather” — Ms. Schenkar was dressed in black. Her corkscrew-curled hair formed a circular bonnet around her face and matched the shape of her wire-rimmed glasses.

Highsmith is best known for “Strangers on a Train,” which Alfred Hitchcock made into a movie in 1951, and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” made into a film with Matt Damon and Jude Law in 1999. Both novels feature sociopaths and murder. (Perhaps you are beginning to see a pattern.)

Ms. Schenkar is convinced that if Highsmith had not become a writer, she would have been a murderer. “From age 8 she wanted to kill her stepfather,” she said, strolling north toward Grove Street, “She was born to murder. She had the mind of a criminal genius.”

Read Patricia Cohen's full piece at NYT. It includes an interactive map of Patricia Highsmith's Greenwich Village.
And PW made The Talented Miss Highsmith their book of the week.