Meet the woman who taught Hollywood how to make a psychopath charming

Long before the fictional character in the Ripley series of crime novels, Tom Ripley, became a screen icon, author of the series, Patricia Highsmith was asking a more unsettling question: what if the person committing the murder was the most interesting person in the room?

There’s something particularly unnerving about Patricia Highsmith’s villains. They don’t necessarily look like villains. They’re not always sweating, snarling, or behaving suspiciously in dark alleyways. They drink wine. They appreciate art. They dress well. They can be funny. They can be cultured, observant and very charming. And sometimes, as in the case of Tom Ripley, you find yourself hoping they get away with murder.

That may be Highsmith’s most enduring trick. More than 70 years after the publication of The Talented Mr Ripley, her influence is still everywhere. Ripley has been played on screen by Alain Delon, Matt Damon, John Malkovich and Barry Pepper, and more recently by Andrew Scott in Steven Zaillian’s acclaimed Netflix series Ripley.

Highsmith’s other novels have inspired films including Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and Todd Haynes’s Carol. The BFI counts more than 20 screen adaptations of her work.

But the fascination begins with the books.

Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921 and grew up in New York. She studied at Barnard College and published her first novel, Strangers on a Train, in 1950. The premise alone tells you something about the kind of writer she was: two strangers meet on a train, discover that each has a person they would like to see dead, and begin contemplating an exchange of murders.

Alfred Hitchcock saw the possibilities immediately, turning the novel into his 1951 film. But Strangers on a Train was only the beginning. Five years later came The Talented Mr Ripley, and with it one of the great antiheroes of modern literature.

Tom Ripley is not a detective hunting a murderer. He’s not an innocent man accidentally caught up in a crime. He is the criminal, and Highsmith puts us so close to his thoughts that his calculations begin to seem almost reasonable. Ripley is a grifter who is given the opportunity to travel to Italy and persuade Dickie Greenleaf, the wealthy son of an American businessman, to return home. Instead, Ripley becomes fascinated by Dickie’s life — his money, his friends, his clothes, his freedom, his cultivated European existence — and begins to imagine that it could be his.

The brilliance of Highsmith’s novel lies not simply in what Ripley does, but on whose side we find ourselves. Crime fiction traditionally offers us a moral structure: crime is committed, the detective investigates, the guilty party is exposed and order is restored. Highsmith was more interested in what happens when that structure collapses.

As the New York Review of Books has observed, her particular genius was her interest in the psychology of the murderer. Her criminals aren’t necessarily driven by the familiar motivations of crime fiction. They can be propelled by envy, desire, boredom, resentment, curiosity, or the intoxicating possibility of becoming someone else.

That’s what makes Ripley so modern. He’s an identity thief before the term existed. He understands that identity is mostly performance: the right clothes, the right accent, the right friends, the right knowledge of art and wine. He watches people closely and learns how to become what they expect him to be. Crucially, Highsmith doesn’t stand outside him, wagging a moral finger. She gets inside his head.

The result is deeply uncomfortable because Ripley isn’t written as a monster. He’s written as a person who happens to be capable of monstrous things.

The BFI has described Highsmith’s protagonists as magnetic, suave, and smooth-talking, noting that she was exceptionally good at making audiences sympathise with characters they know are dangerous. It’s a formula Hollywood has returned to repeatedly.

The 1960 French adaptation, Plein Soleil, gave Ripley Alain Delon’s extraordinary physical beauty. Anthony Minghella’s 1999 The Talented Mr Ripley cast Matt Damon as a more vulnerable, anxious version of the character, opposite Jude Law’s dazzling Dickie Greenleaf. Andrew Scott’s 2024 Ripley stripped away much of the glamour and made him quieter, colder, and more inscrutable. Different actors, different decades, different Ripleys — but the same literary DNA.

Highsmith wrote four more Ripley novels: Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley and Ripley Under Water. Across the books, he evolves from a relatively inexperienced murderer into a sophisticated criminal who has developed an almost enviable talent for evading consequences.

That longevity is part of Highsmith’s achievement. Ripley isn’t simply a character with a good plot. He’s an endlessly adaptable idea. What if morality is merely an inconvenience? What if charm is more useful than innocence? What if the person who understands the rules best is the person most capable of breaking them?

Highsmith herself was considerably more complicated than the image of the chilly crime writer might suggest. She spent much of her adult life in Europe, eventually settling in Switzerland. She was famously private and uncomfortable with publicity. In a rare 1988 interview, she told Sight and Sound that she preferred living in the country because it was quiet and described writing as something she needed to do alone. She also had little interest in becoming involved in the film adaptations of her work, saying that once she had sold the rights, directors should be left to do their jobs.

She was, however, intensely interested in the psychology of her characters. Her notebooks and diaries, published decades after her death, reveal just how deliberately she thought about writing, personality, and desire.

The 2021 publication Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941–1995 drew on a vast archive of material and offered a far more intimate picture of the writer behind the books. There’s also another Highsmith worth remembering.

Before Ripley, there was The Price of Salt, published in 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. Its story of a relationship between two women was remarkable for its time, particularly because it refused the tragic ending that was so common in depictions of same-sex relationships. Highsmith eventually acknowledged the book under her own name, and it was adapted by Todd Haynes as Carol in 2015.

It’s tempting to reduce Highsmith to “the woman who created Tom Ripley”, but that undersells her. She was a novelist of outsiders, obsessives, voyeurs, liars, and people who felt somehow misplaced in ordinary society. Her characters often want what other people have — a relationship, a home, money, status, beauty, freedom — and the distance between wanting something and believing you deserve it is where Highsmith’s darkness begins.

She also understood something that remains relevant in an age of carefully constructed identities: people are often less interested in who you really are than in whether you can convincingly perform the person they want you to be. That may explain why Ripley keeps coming back.

The Netflix series Ripley, starring Andrew Scott, introduced the character to a new generation in 2024, while retaining the central premise of the 1955 novel: a struggling grifter is offered a route into a world of wealth and privilege and builds a web of deception to stay there.

Now Highsmith herself steps into the spotlight. In A Talent for Murder, Helen Mirren plays a fictionalised Patricia Highsmith, with Alden Ehrenreich as a young literary agent who arrives at her secluded Swiss home hoping to persuade her to write another Ripley novel.

Directed by Anton Corbijn, the film draws on Highsmith’s reputation, her characters, and the unsettling territory where fiction and reality begin to overlap. It’s an intriguing premise because Highsmith was, in many ways, already a character worthy of one of her own novels. Brilliant, private, difficult, provocative, and fascinated by the darker corners of human behaviour, she spent her career looking at the things polite society preferred not to examine too closely. She didn’t invent the charming killer. But she helped change what the killer could be.

After Highsmith, the murderer did not have to be the obvious villain. He could be the man at the dinner party who knows the best wine. The sophisticated traveller who speaks several languages. The charming stranger who makes you laugh. The apparently ordinary neighbour. The person whose company you enjoy before you realise you should probably be afraid of him.

That’s the real legacy of Patricia Highsmith. She made evil interesting. More dangerously, she made it understandable. And once a writer has persuaded you to spend 300 pages inside the mind of a murderer — and perhaps even quietly hope that he gets away with it — you’re unlikely to look at crime fiction in the same way ever again.

A Talent for Murder is currently showing in South African cinemas

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