Patricia Highsmith, the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley, said she was “born under a sickly star”. When she was still in the womb, her mother, Mary, tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Later, Mary would laugh and taunt her daughter: “It’s funny, you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat.” By the time she was eight years old, Highsmith, who was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in January 1921, dreamt about murdering her stepfather.
Highsmith went on to write some of the most unsettling novels of the 20th century. Graham Greene called her the “poet of apprehension”, a writer who created “a world without moral endings... Nothing is certain when we have crossed this frontier.” The novelist Will Self