R. T. Raichev’s articles related to mystery fiction have appeared on this site frequently. This time, he trains his critical eye on Patricia Highsmith, an author whose short stories appeared in EQMM over several decades. R.T. Raichev is also a novelist and short story writer. “Blind Witness,” a new story in his series starring mystery writer Antonia Darcy, is coming up in our May/June 2024 issue. Don’t miss it!  —Janet Hutchings

What kind of book was a nine-year old American girl in 1930 most likely to be seen curled up with? That perennial favorite the Wizard of Oz, never out of print, with doughty Dorothy as a heroine to emulate? Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women? The first Nancy Drew adventure, which had just been published? Or perhaps Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind,  also fresh from the mint—a collection of case histories of mental aberration and deviant criminal behavior, such as kleptomania, pedophilia and satanism—

No, of course not, not the Menninger. Age inappropriate, taboo topics, too shocking and outlandish and, at any rate, it would be incomprehensible to a child. Well, yes, absolutely. Yet, it was Menninger and not Nancy Drew—or Dorothy—or Jo March—that captured the precocious imagination of a (not very happy) little girl, 9-year-old Pat—the future author Patricia Highsmith. She read and then re-read the Human Mind and got to know it well—having picked it up from her stepfather’s shelf. Later in life Highsmith explained how she had been instantly drawn to Menninger’s agglomerate of anecdotes and analyses of irrational urges which led to violence and self-destruction, that it was indeed The Human Mind which propelled her towards becoming a writer. And not any writer—she became—in the words of author and critic Terry Castle— “one of the greatest, darkest American storytellers since Poe.”

From what various biographies tell us Patricia Highsmith was a strange lady whose preoccupations, fixations and unhealthy obsessions are reflected in her writing. “Murder,” she records in her diary in 1950, “is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing.”* She seemed to be riveted by what most other people found objectionable. “They give me a sort of tranquility,” she said of the snails she kept in a fish tank—and later, in much greater numbers, in her back garden. She condemned the French calling them “cannibals” for consuming gastropods.

While Patricia Highsmith the novelist has been saluted as the doyenne of the psychological thriller, it is titles like the Countess of Outré and Duchess of Weird she deserves for her short stories. It is in them that she gives vent to her murkiest fantasies involving derangement, anarchic disorder and various kinds of unimaginable terror. In that respect her stories resemble Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, (think “The Landlady,” “Pig” and “Royal Jelly”) or Shirley Jackson’s stories such as “The Lottery”.  

Highsmith’s stories have been seen as merciless indictments of the suburban American dream of the mid-20th century which are likely to leave the reader feeling by turns startled, oppressed and amused. But  there are also those who find them too disturbing, off-putting, queasy, even stomach-churning. British publisher Victor Gollanz disliked Highsmith “intensely”—as Julian Symons records in his Bloody Murder. Crime writer Robert Barnard didn’t see the point of Highsmith either.

She wrote nine collections of short stories on subjects that embraced the bizarre, the surreal, the nightmarish and indeed, the taboo. So we get matricide in “The Terrapin,” decaying immortality in “No End in View” (about a  woman who has reached the Biblical old age of 190 but simply refuses to die), an unnerving sack-like creature that haunts a lonely housewife (but is not a figment of her imagination) in “Not in This World, Probably in the Next,” a colony of snails crushing the man who breeds them in “The Snail-Watcher” and a giant snail chasing and killing the scientist who not only discovered it but gave it his name (Clavering)  in “The Quest for Blank Claveringi”. And in “Woodrow Wilson’s Necktie” we encounter a playful young psychopath who murders all the staff of an Indiana waxworks and substitutes their corpses for the display dummies  

Patricia Highsmith also wrote not only one but two stories featuring a severed hand. The first of these—“The Hand”—comes from one of her most unorthodox short-story collections Little Tales of Misogyny**. The book was first published in a German translation in Switzerland in 1975—which somehow adds to its oddity—under the title Kleine Geschichte für Weiberfeinde. In its original English version it saw the light of day in the UK in 1977 under Heinemann’s prestigious imprimatur. Each kleine geschihte—as a German would say—involves a female protagonist who either falls prey to some violent misdemeanor—or is its perpetrator. 

Though “The Hand” is only two pages long Highsmith manages to deliver a shock with the very first sentence:

A young man asked a father for his daughter’s hand and received it in a box—her left hand.

The young man signs a receipt for it and although there has been no official marriage, “on paper, or in the church,” he starts worrying that the girl’s father will hold him responsible for her upkeep. He tries to see the girl but each time is “blocked by tradesmen,” so he buries the hand in his garden. When the police learn of it, they arrest him, he is found criminally insane and locked away in a “State Institution”—while the real madman, the girl’s father, remains at large.

The girl—who hasn’t bled to death—visits the young man—”her stump concealed in a muff”—but now she disgusts him and he refuses to so much as look at her. Consequently he is placed in a “more disagreeable ward” where, deprived of books and company, he goes truly insane. He thinks what a “horrible mistake, crime even, it had been demanding such a barbaric thing as a girl’s hand”. He lies on his bed with his face to the wall—and dies.

The story is written in a simple, brisk, matter-of-fact style. None of the characters is given a name and it is never made clear where or when the action takes place. Should it be taken as a universal warning about the perils of asking for things in ambiguous terms? The moral seems to be that conventions of marriage are barbarous and ruinous for both parties and that marriage should be avoided at all cost. It is up to the reader to decide whether The Hand is a Kafkaesque fable, a skewed satire inspired by Gogol’s “The Nose” (Highsmith did read the great Russians), a macabre but not-to-be-taken-too-seriously cautionary tale—or just a cruel joke. (I can’t help thinking of it as a treatment for a film Luis Bunuel meant to make but never did.)

Highsmith’s other story centering round a severed hand is entitled “Something the Cat Dragged In.” It first appeared in Verdict of 13, A Detection Club Anthology (Faber) in 1979 as one of thirteen short stories written by members of Britain’s Detection Club under the editorship of the then Club president Julian Symons. Each contributor was asked to submit a story which in one way or another concerns a jury; it didn’t have to be an official jury presiding in a  court of law nor did it need to number twelve. The main requirement was that the ‘jury’ should make an important decision about a crime and its perpetrator. (As it happens, the crime in each case is murder.) Among the illustrious contributors were Ngaio Marsh, P.D. James, Christianna Brand, Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Symons himself.

“Something the Cat Dragged In” is completely different from “The Hand” in that it follows a conventional plot-line, contains suspense and has a structure that resembles a three-act play. It opens in an uncharacteristically (for Highsmith) ‘cosy’ fashion at a manor house in the English countryside, at tea-time, with a small, well-bred house party engaged on a game of Scrabble. The family cat, Portland Bill, brings in a peculiar-looking object which is initially taken for a dead pigeon or a goose foot but turns out to be two human fingers, “dead white and puffy…which included a couple of inches of what had been the hand”.***

Host and guests play at detectives. They suspect foul play. They deduce from the short, thick, dirty nails that the victim was a “workman of some kind”. A wedding ring is discovered embedded in one of the fingers; the initials engraved on it provide a clue about the man’s identity. Further investigation leads them to a neighbour named Dickenson who, faced with the prospect of the police getting involved, makes a confession: he killed one of his workers, Bill Reeves. The latter was a truly despicable character, a “creep,” a compulsive harasser of local wives, including Dickenson’s. 

The killing itself was unpremeditated, a sudden, spontaneous outburst of lethal violence (a typical Highsmith trope), the result of a serious provocation on Reeves’s part. It all happened in the field. It was in fact Dickenson and another of his farm hands called Peter—with whose wife Reeves had had an affair—who killed Reeves by means of a hammer and an axe. (The sharing/transference of guilt is another recurrent Highsmith motif.) They then buried the body in the field—minus the fingers which they chopped off in order to get rid of the ring—but which they then lost and the fingers were found and carried away by Portland Bill. 

Host, hostess and guests act as jury and, after some deliberation, reach the decision that the odious occurrence was justifiable homicide, consequently they do not report Dickenson to the police. They then get rid of the fingers.

It is the story’s  ‘Englishness’ that, to my mind, is its most remarkable features—the whole conservative, somewhat comic upper-class ethos!—coming as it does from the pen of Patricia Highsmith. A Colonel Phelps sporting a ‘Kipling-style moustache’ is one of the guests—sang-froid, phlegm and discretion mark the characters’ demeanor as they deal with the tense situation—an effort is made to keep the incident dark from Edna, the housekeeper-cook (pas devant…)—the dead fingers are wrapped in a copy of the Times and then placed inside an empty house-slippers box—the arrival of the tea-tray interrupts the discussion about whether to call the police or not—they keep shooing Portland Bill off the fingers—roses are being dead-headed by a character who then wonders, ‘Why did Americans always think in such violent terms?’ (The Colonel has brought his American niece with him.)****  

Class—another very English thing—is one of the story’s themes. We learn that Dickenson is a “gentleman farmer…whose family had owned their land…for generations.” And Dickenson describes the victim as, “Arrogant, you know, so pleased with himself, that the master’s wife had deigned to look at him.” Dickenson is not sure whether it was he or Peter who deliver the fatal blow—but he is prepared, very feudally, to take full responsibility. He tells his host, “You understand, I think. I can talk to you. You are a man like myself.” By which he means both are gentlemen.

The morally ambiguous ending—allowing the killer to go scot-free—is characteristic of Highsmith. It will be remembered that she wrote five novels (of varying quality) starring likable killer Tom Ripley whom she never allowed to be apprehended. And she makes us sympathize with and really care for long-suffering Vic and love-lorn, delusional David, murderous protagonists of, respectively, Deep Water (1957) and This Sweet Sickness (1960). All three of these characters display strong psychopathic traits.

On the last page of “Something the Cat Dragged In” cook-housekeeper Edna, who clearly knows what has been happening, either from accidental over-hearing or eavesdropping, says, “I bet  Mr Dickenson wrecks his car on the way home. That’s often the way it is.”

Edna means Fate—or God—intervening and providing either Karma or Holy Punishment. But in a triumphant concluding sentence the author—who once declared the “public passion for justice quite boring and artificial”—makes it absolutely clear that nothing of the sort happens:

Tom Dickenson did not wreck his car.

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* A similar sentiment has been expressed by Alfred Hitchcock who is quoted as saying, “Film your murders like love scenes, and your love scenes like murders.”

** Highsmith’s other two collections of highly unorthodox short stories areThe Book of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (about bizarre extremes of environmental degradation and various apocalyptic disasters in a demented world) and The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder, which deals with the murderously competitive desires of a number of animals.

*** Other cats have also played crucial roles in murder mysteries, tho I can only think of cats in English whodunits. In Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced (1950) the Vicarage cat Tiglath Pilser shows Miss Marple “how the lights fused,” what in fact the killer did as an essential part of the murder scheme. In Ngaio Marsh’s Scales of Justice (1955) a cat called Thomasina Twitchett eats an important murder clue—the fish bearing the imprint of murderess’s high heel. In Marsh’s Black as He is Painted(1975) a cat named Lucy Locket provides a pointer to one of the mysteries in the story, in the shape of a ceramic medallion fashioned as a fish. Incidentally, Highsmith considered whodunits just “a silly way of teasing people.”

**** Highsmith lived in Sussex, England for a while in the 1960s. Her 1965 novel Suspension of Mercy is also set in the English countryside. The fact that she  manages to get a certain rarefied type of Englishness right and make it genuinely amusing defies the notion that she was a predominantly melancholy, gloomy sort of American writer whose sense of humour was of the gallows kind. It is also a testimony to Highsmith’s powers of observation and to her versatility. Pity she didn’t do anything else in an ‘English’ vein.