Thursday May 8th, save the date for the Ocean Drive/A Lonesome Place for Dying book launch! 7pm at the Irish Heather on Keefer Street. Both Sam Wiebe and Nolan Chase will be in attendance.
You can pre-order both books now at your favorite independent bookshop:
Patricia Highsmith is one of the greatest crime writers. I probably don’t need to even write that. Between the Ripley novels, Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt and The Two Faces of January, her work has not only endured but bridged the chasm of traditional and modern fans. A reader who loves Charles Williford probably also loves Highsmith, but chances are so does someone who loves Gillian Flynn.
It helps that there have been a spate of high-quality Highsmith adaptations at regular intervals, including Todd Haynes’ Carol, and an upcoming Ripley series for Netflix.
When I mentioned to a friend I was reading Those Who Walk Away, he pointed out that the book probably wouldn’t find success if it were published today. It’s a curious paradox that Highsmith’s style of crime novel—the novel of suspense, as she called it—is as unfashionable today as her work is enduring.
Those Who Walk Away is about Ray Garrett, whose father-in-law, Ed Coleman, is trying to kill him. Coleman believes his daughter’s suicide was Garrett’s fault. When Coleman wounds Garrett with a pistol, Garrett recovers, has the bullet hole in his coat stitched up, and rejoins Coleman’s party, pretending the attempt never happened.
Garrett, while not guilty in the sense of being responsible for his wife’s suicide, feels guilty for not preventing it. The difference means nothing to Coleman. Another attempt happens, and Garrett’s response is even more strange.
Slavoj Zizek called the two men’s actions “immoral yet ethical,” a term he also applies to Tom Ripley. (Zizek is a terrific close reader whose theoretical musings on Hegel and Lacan absolutely defeat me.)
What makes Those Who Walk Away unlike most of today’s thrillers isn’t that it’s about two men (white, upper-middle-class and Europhilic, as many Highsmith characters are). It’s that the novel is only about the two men.
No bomb at the Super Bowl, no planetary destruction, no long-buried secret. Not even a great deal of passion. Just the two characters circling each other. The violence is detached—even from the recipient:
Ray was vaguely aware of Coleman tugging in his pocket for something. Then Coleman faced him suddenly and a shot exploded between them, rocking Ray against a hedge, making his ears ring, so that for a few seconds he could not hear Coleman’s running feet on the pavement. Coleman was out of sight, Ray did not know if a bullet had knocked him backward, or if he had fallen back with a surprise.
Those Who Walk Away is a small story, absent melodrama and grand themes. It’s gruesome, and a delight. Crime fiction could use more of that.