The chilling and charming sides of Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith, who died in 1995 at age 74, is acclaimed for her novels of off-handed murder and banal evil. A driven author who wrote 22 novels as well as short stories and essays, she is most famous for the perversely captivating novels "Strangers on a Train" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley." In her novels, her chillingly chameleonlike protagonists literally get away with murder, and it is a testament to Highsmith's gifts as a writer that as readers we are glad they do.

In his well-researched biography, "Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith," British journalist Andrew Wilson writes that Highsmith was fascinated by evil and what she saw as a great chasm between appearance and reality. Though her murderers always appear to be introverted average Joes, they become cold-blooded killers who sometimes murder over insignificant, even imagined grievances. Highsmith's own life was less opaque. Though Wilson never met Highsmith, he got access to the obsessive notebooks and diaries she kept throughout her life. The biography is filled with Highsmith's voice, and it can be disturbing.

For instance, as a young woman she worked briefly as a clerk at Bloomingdale's, where she became infatuated with a beautiful woman who bought a doll for her daughter. Highsmith tracked the woman to the affluent New Jersey suburb where she lived. Spying on the woman, stalking her, Highsmith wrote that "I felt quite close to murder too. ... Murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing. (Is it not, too, a way of gaining complete and passionate attention, for a moment, from the object of one's attentions?)" Highsmith turned her unrequited obsession with the New Jersey mother into the 1952 novel "The Price of Salt," a lesbian love story notable for its upbeat ending, rare in homosexual literature of the period.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Highsmith started her professional life in New York City, eventually making her home in Europe, moving every few years between idyllic spots in France, England, Germany and Switzerland. She achieved critical success by her early 30s, and her acquaintances included such literary and cultural luminaries as Janet Flanner, the New Yorker's longtime Paris correspondent, art patron Peggy Guggenheim, actress Jeanne Moreau and writers Gore Vidal and Arthur Koestler.

Yet her personal life was messy and frequently unhappy. A lesbian who never bothered to closet her sexuality, she was constantly falling in and out of love and in and out of bed. She would live with one lover while having an affair with another. Highsmith seems to have been intentionally cruel to several lovers, though she continued having affairs, often with much younger women, well into her 60s.

She drank too much, primarily whiskey, martinis and beer, and smoked heavily. Though she could be a gourmet cook, she ate little and by the end of her life was anemic. Her drinking may have been partly to blame for her capriciousness with publishers, whom she courted and dropped like lovers.

And she was eccentric in creepy ways. She was highly critical of people and became a vitriolic racist and anti-Semite in her later years. Yet she adored animals, especially cats and snails. She wrote several macabre short stories about snails, which she kept in her house as pets. Highsmith once went to a cocktail party and opened her handbag to reveal a half head of lettuce being devoured by several hundred of her pet snails. She loved the snails partly for their shock value.

Highsmith could also be charming and supportive. In "Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s," Marijane Meaker recounts her two-year affair with Highsmith in the late 1950s, when Highsmith was 38 and Meaker a 32-year-old author of dime-store paperbacks. Clumsily written, the memoir nevertheless reveals the romantic side of Highsmith. Meaker writes that Highsmith was not only a terrific lover but courtly in an old-fashioned way, jumping up when a woman came in the room, giving the woman a little bow and holding doors open.

Though Wilson's admirable biography is by far the meatier of the two, together the books offer an intriguing portrait of one of the 20th century's most original and darkly seductive authors.