Author Guide · Psychological Suspense
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In 1948 Patricia Highsmith took a Christmas job on the toy counter at Bloomingdale’s, sold a doll to a blonde woman in a mink coat, and went home with the idea for The Price of Salt. Two years later her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was bought by Alfred Hitchcock; five years later she invented Tom Ripley, the charming killer she returned to four more times over 36 years. She wrote 22 novels, most of them more interested in the murderer’s mind than in who did it, and from the early 1960s she lived in Europe, dying in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1995. This guide covers her 13 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 13 key books · 1950–1991 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Patricia Highsmith wrote 22 novels. The best known are The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), the first of five Ripley novels, Strangers on a Train (1950) and The Price of Salt (1952), now usually published as Carol. Start with The Talented Mr. Ripley; below is the order of the Ripley books and where her lesser-known novels fit.
Where to Start with Patricia Highsmith
If you want her most famous character
→ The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) — the first Ripley novel.
If you want the book Hitchcock filmed
→ Strangers on a Train (1950) — her 1950 debut.
If you want her love story
→ The Price of Salt (1952) — published under a pseudonym, now known as Carol.
If you want her darkest novel without a murder plot
→ Edith’s Diary (1977).
13 Patricia Highsmith Books, in Order
Strangers on a Train
The architect Guy Haines wants to divorce his unfaithful wife Miriam; on a train he meets Charles Bruno, who proposes that each of them commit the other’s murder. Guy does not take him seriously until Bruno kills Miriam, and then wears him down until he kills Bruno’s father. Harper & Brothers published it in March 1950, and Alfred Hitchcock filmed it in 1951.
The Price of Salt
Therese Belivet, a young would-be stage designer working the toy department of a Manhattan store, falls in love with Carol Aird, an older customer in the middle of a divorce; a road trip west is followed by a private investigator hired by Carol’s husband. Afraid of being labelled a “lesbian-book writer”, Highsmith published it as Claire Morgan. The 1953 Bantam paperback sold nearly a million copies, and in 1990 Bloomsbury reissued it as Carol under her own name.
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Herbert Greenleaf pays Tom Ripley, a small-time New York con man, to go to Italy and bring his son Dickie home. Ripley kills Dickie, takes over his identity, kills Dickie’s friend Freddie Miles and ends the book not caught but rich. It won the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and a scroll from the Mystery Writers of America in 1957.
Deep Water
In the small town of Little Wesley, Vic Van Allen tolerates his wife Melinda’s lovers, until he claims, as a joke, to have killed one of them, and then starts actually doing it. Her fifth novel. It was filmed by Michel Deville in 1981 with Isabelle Huppert, and by Adrian Lyne in 2022 with Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas.
This Sweet Sickness
David Kelsey, a chemist, leads a double life as “William Neumeister”, keeping a house where he waits for Annabelle, the woman he loves, who has married someone else. The French film Dites-lui que je l’aime (1977) was based on it.
The Cry of the Owl
Robert Forester, recently separated, takes to watching a young woman, Jenny, through her kitchen window in small-town Pennsylvania; when she finds out, she is drawn to him rather than frightened, and her fiancé’s jealousy sets off a chain of violence in which the watcher is the one hunted. Claude Chabrol filmed it in 1987.
The Two Faces of January
In Athens, the American swindler Chester MacFarland kills a Greek policeman in his hotel, and a young American drifter, Rydal Keener, helps him and his wife escape, for reasons that have to do with his own father. It won the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger in 1964 and was filmed in 2014 with Viggo Mortensen.
The Tremor of Forgery
Howard Ingham, an American writer, waits in Tunisia for a film director who never arrives. One night he throws his typewriter at an intruder in his bungalow, possibly killing him, and the body is carried away. Graham Greene called it “Miss Highsmith’s finest novel”.
Ripley Under Ground
Six years on, Ripley lives at Belle Ombre, a house near Fontainebleau, with his wife Héloïse, and profits secretly from forged paintings sold as the work of a dead artist, Derwatt. When a collector, Murchison, spots the fraud, Ripley kills him and ends up impersonating Derwatt himself. Filmed in 2005 with Barry Pepper.
Ripley’s Game
Ripley manipulates Jonathan Trevanny, a picture framer with leukaemia who once snubbed him, into becoming a hitman for the gangster Reeves Minot, and is then drawn into helping him. Wim Wenders adapted it as The American Friend (1977) with Dennis Hopper; John Malkovich played Ripley in a 2002 film under the book’s title.
Edith’s Diary
Edith Howland moves from New York to small-town Pennsylvania with her husband Brett and their son Cliffie in the late 1950s. As Brett leaves her, Cliffie drifts into drink and failure and she cares for a senile uncle, her diary records an imagined, successful family instead. Knopf rejected it in 1976 because it fitted no genre; Heinemann published it in London in 1977.
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
Frank Pierson, a rich American teenager who admits to pushing his father off a cliff, turns up at Belle Ombre and attaches himself to Ripley. When Frank is kidnapped in Berlin, Ripley goes to get him back.
Ripley Under Water
An American couple, David and Janice Pritchard, move into a house near Belle Ombre and start digging into the Murchison disappearance from Ripley Under Ground. Her last Ripley novel, published four years before her death.
In What Order to Read Patricia Highsmith
Her standalone novels do not connect, so read them in any order. The Ripley books are a series and are best read in publication order: The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) and Ripley Under Water (1991). The first stands alone; the later four share a setting (Belle Ombre, his house in France), his wife Héloïse and recurring characters, and Ripley Under Water returns to the murder at the heart of Ripley Under Ground.
Outside Ripley, publication order shows a writer moving from tightly plotted suspense (Strangers on a Train, Deep Water) to slower, stranger books where the crime is uncertain or absent (The Tremor of Forgery, Edith’s Diary).
A reading path
1. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)
2. Strangers on a Train (1950)
3. The Price of Salt / Carol (1952)
4. Deep Water (1957)
5. Edith’s Diary (1977)
Everything Else Patricia Highsmith Published
Beyond the 13 key books: 19 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other novels
9
9 books · 1954–1995
- 1954The Blunderera man whose daydreams about killing his wife copy a real murder
- 1958A Game for the Livinga murder in Mexico City
- 1964The Glass Cella wrongly convicted man after prison
- 1965A Suspension of Mercypublished in the US as The Story-Teller
- 1967Those Who Walk Awaya father pursues his son-in-law to Venice
- 1972A Dog’s Ransoma kidnapped poodle in New York
- 1983People Who Knock on the Doora Midwestern family and religion
- 1986Found in the StreetGreenwich Village
- 1995Small g: a Summer Idyllset around a Zurich bar, published after her death
Short story collections
8
8 books · 1970–2002
- 1970ElevenUS title The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories; foreword by Graham Greene
- 1975The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murderanimals turn on humans
- 1975Little Tales of Misogynyfirst published in German; English edition 1977
- 1979Slowly, Slowly in the Windstories
- 1981The Black Housestories
- 1985Mermaids on the Golf Coursestories
- 1987Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophesstories
- 2002Nothing That Meets the Eyeuncollected stories, posthumous
Non-fiction
2
2 books · 1966–2021
- 1966Plotting and Writing Suspense Fictionher guide to the craft, revised in 1981
- 2021Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941–1995edited by Anna von Planta
The years · 1921–1995
Quick facts about Patricia Highsmith
- Known for
- Psychological suspense told from inside the criminal’s head, above all the five novels about Tom Ripley, a likeable murderer who is never caught.
- 1921
- Born in Fort Worth, Texas
- 1977
- Edith’s Diary
- 1995
- Dies in Locarno, Switzerland
- Born
- 19 January 1921, Fort Worth, Texas, as Mary Patricia Plangman; she took her stepfather’s surname
- Died
- 4 February 1995, Locarno, Switzerland
- Education
- Barnard College, New York, 1942
- Lived
- New York; England (Suffolk) from the 1960s; France from 1967; then Ticino, Switzerland
- Honours
- Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (1957); CWA Silver Dagger (1964); Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1990)
- Pseudonym
- Claire Morgan, for The Price of Salt (1952)
- Novels
- 22, five of them about Tom Ripley
The red mark is 1955: The Talented Mr. Ripley, the first of her five Ripley novels.
How Patricia Highsmith Writes: Inside the Criminal’s Head
Highsmith writes most of her books from inside the person who commits the crime, or comes close to it. The question is rarely who did it; the reader knows from the start. The suspense lies in whether the killer will be caught and, more uncomfortably, in how far the reader has started to hope he will not. Ripley is the extreme case: across five novels he kills repeatedly and is never punished.
Her prose is flat, precise and practical: what a character eats, what he packs, which train he catches, how he gets rid of a body. Guilt, anxiety and self-justification come through those details rather than through commentary. In Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966) she argued that art has nothing to do with morality, and her plots back her up: crimes go unsolved, innocent people suffer, and the ending often simply stops.
Her later books push further from the crime novel. In The Tremor of Forgery it is never clear whether anyone was killed, and Edith’s Diary has no murder plot at all, only a woman writing a better life than the one she has. Publishers were not always sure what to do with them: Knopf turned Edith’s Diary down because it fitted no genre.
Watch
Patricia Highsmith on Ripley and the films of her books
In an interview first broadcast on the French television programme Variances in August 1971, Highsmith talks about her writing, Tom Ripley and the films made from her novels so far.
Frequently asked questions about Patricia Highsmith’s books
How many books has Patricia Highsmith written?
22 novels, of which 13 are the key books on this page and 9 are listed under “Everything else”. She also published seven story collections in her lifetime, with more collected after her death, a book on writing, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966), and her diaries and notebooks appeared in 2021.
What are Patricia Highsmith’s books in order?
The key books are Strangers on a Train (1950), The Price of Salt (1952), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Deep Water (1957), This Sweet Sickness (1960), The Cry of the Owl (1962), The Two Faces of January (1964), The Tremor of Forgery (1969), Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974), Edith’s Diary (1977), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) and Ripley Under Water (1991).
In what order should I read the Ripley books?
In publication order: The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) and Ripley Under Water (1991). Together they are often called the Ripliad. The first can be read on its own; Ripley Under Water depends on the murder in Ripley Under Ground.
Where should I start with Patricia Highsmith?
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). It introduces her most famous character and shows her method at its clearest: the story told from the killer’s side. If you prefer a book without a murder at its centre, start with The Price of Salt, published today as Carol.
What is Patricia Highsmith’s most famous book?
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), which won the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and has been filmed as Plein Soleil (1960), Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and the Netflix series Ripley (2024). Strangers on a Train is best known through Hitchcock’s 1951 film.
Which films and series are based on Patricia Highsmith’s books?
The best known are Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951); René Clément’s Plein Soleil (1960) with Alain Delon as Ripley; Wim Wenders’s The American Friend (1977), from Ripley’s Game, with Dennis Hopper; Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) with Matt Damon; Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015) with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, which had six Oscar nominations; Adrian Lyne’s Deep Water (2022); and Steven Zaillian’s black-and-white Netflix series Ripley (2024) with Andrew Scott.
Is Carol the same book as The Price of Salt?
Yes. Highsmith published it in 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan because she did not want to be labelled a “lesbian-book writer”. The paperback sold nearly a million copies. In 1990 Bloomsbury reissued it as Carol under her own name, with an afterword by her, and most editions now use that title.
Did Patricia Highsmith hold antisemitic and racist views?
Yes, according to her biographers and to her own private writings. Her diaries, notebooks and letters contain antisemitic and racist remarks, and the novelist Christopher Priest, reviewing her published diaries in The Spectator in 2021, wrote that she “often shocked friends and colleagues with her racist and anti-Semitic remarks, especially in later years”. Richard Bradford’s biography Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires (2021) treats them at length, drawing on her notebooks and interviews with people who knew her, as did the earlier biographies by Andrew Wilson (Beautiful Shadow, 2003) and Joan Schenkar (The Talented Miss Highsmith, 2009).
Is Patricia Highsmith still alive?
No. She was born on 19 January 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas, and died on 4 February 1995 in Locarno, Switzerland, where she had lived for her last years. Her last novel, Small g: a Summer Idyll, was published after her death.
Footnotes
- Patricia Highsmith bibliography — Wikipedia
- Tom Ripley — Wikipedia
- The Price of Salt — Wikipedia
- Highsmith, Patricia 1921–1995 — Encyclopedia.com
- A glimpse of the real Patricia Highsmith — The Spectator, 2021
- Fiction for Revenge (on Humanity) — The Gay & Lesbian Review, 2021
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Art has nothing to do with morality, convention, or moralizing.”
— Patricia Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966)
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