Authors Like Patricia Highsmith

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russian · Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821 and died in St Petersburg in 1881. In 1849 he was sentenced to death for belonging to a radical circle, reprieved at the last moment and sent to a Siberian prison camp. Crime and Punishment follows Raskolnikov, a poor former student who murders a pawnbroker to prove he is above ordinary morality, and the guilt that follows. His journalism contains antisemitic passages that scholars still discuss.

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Albert Camus

French · The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), The Fall (1956)

Camus was born in French Algeria in 1913 and died in a car crash in France in 1960, three years after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Stranger is narrated by Meursault, a clerk in Algiers who shoots a man on a beach and is condemned as much for failing to weep at his mother’s funeral as for the killing.

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Jim Thompson

American · The Killer Inside Me (1952), The Grifters (1963), Pop. 1280 (1964)

Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma Territory, in 1906 and died in Los Angeles in 1977. The Killer Inside Me is narrated by Lou Ford, an amiable, slightly dull-seeming deputy sheriff in a small Texas town who is a murderer; The Grifters was filmed by Stephen Frears in 1990. The critic Geoffrey O’Brien called him a “Dimestore Dostoevsky”.

Graham Greene

British · Brighton Rock (1938), The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet American (1955)

Greene was born in Berkhamsted in 1904 and died in Switzerland in 1991. Brighton Rock follows Pinkie, a teenage gangster in Brighton, and the young waitress he marries to keep her from giving evidence; The End of the Affair is a love story in which jealousy turns into an argument with God. He called Highsmith “the poet of apprehension”.

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Daphne du Maurier

British · Rebecca (1938), My Cousin Rachel (1951), “Don’t Look Now” (1971)

Du Maurier was born in London in 1907 and spent most of her life in Cornwall, where she died in 1989. Rebecca follows a young second wife haunted by the memory of her husband’s first; My Cousin Rachel leaves its narrator, and the reader, unable to decide whether the woman he loves poisoned the cousin who raised him. In 1941 critics pointed out similarities between Rebecca and the Brazilian writer Carolina Nabuco’s A Sucessora (1934); du Maurier said she had never heard of it.

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Ruth Rendell

British · A Demon in My View (1976), A Judgement in Stone (1977), A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986, as Barbara Vine)

Rendell was born in London in 1930 and died in 2015. Alongside her Inspector Wexford detective novels, which began with From Doon with Death (1964), she wrote stand-alone psychological novels: A Demon in My View won the Gold Dagger, and A Judgement in Stone tells you in its first sentence who killed the Coverdale family and why. As Barbara Vine she won the Edgar Award for A Dark-Adapted Eye. She was made a life peer in 1997.

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Donna Tartt

American · The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), The Goldfinch (2013)

Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1963. The Secret History is narrated by Richard Papen, a student from a modest Californian background who joins a clique of wealthy classics students at a Vermont college and becomes complicit in a murder that the novel reveals in its first pages. The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014.

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Gillian Flynn

American · Sharp Objects (2006), Dark Places (2009), Gone Girl (2012)

Flynn was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1971 and wrote for Entertainment Weekly before publishing her first novel. Gone Girl alternates between a husband suspected of killing his missing wife and the wife’s diary, until the novel turns on itself halfway through; David Fincher filmed it in 2014 from Flynn’s own screenplay.

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Ottessa Moshfegh

American · Eileen (2015), My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Lapvona (2022)

Moshfegh was born in Boston in 1981. Eileen, narrated by a young woman who worked at a boys’ prison in 1960s Massachusetts, looking back on the week she left her hometown for good, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows a young New Yorker who sets out to sleep for a year.

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Sarah Waters

Welsh · Fingersmith (2002), The Night Watch (2006), The Paying Guests (2014)

Waters was born in Wales in 1966 and writes historical novels, often about women who love women. Fingersmith is a Victorian story of a swindle in which two young women, one of them a thief, fall in love; The Paying Guests, set in London in 1922, follows a spinster and her lodger’s wife into an affair and a killing. Fingersmith and The Night Watch were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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