Obsessed with murder: how the creator of The Talented Mr Ripley came close to committing the crime herself

Patricia Highsmith was so enamoured with Tom Ripley – currently being played by Andrew Scott in the Netflix adaptation – that she’d sign letters using his name and describe murder as a ‘kind of making love’. But, as her biographer Andrew Wilson discovered, her most famous killer was a cover for her own darkest thoughts...

Killer idea: the charming psychopath who has captured readers’ minds for decades ‘was an embodiment of Highsmith’s darkest desires’ (Getty/Lorenzo Sisti/Netflix)

In June 1952 – two years before she started to write The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith had a dream about killing someone. In her nightmare, she was setting fire to a girl who resembled herself. As the flames began to engulf the naked body of the young woman, Highsmith felt guilty about committing the terrible crime. On waking, she tried to analyse the meaning of the dream. “I had two identities: the victim and the murderer,” she wrote in her notebook.

Highsmith – the creator of Tom Ripley, currently being captured beautifully by Andrew Scott in the new Netflix series Ripley – was obsessed with murder. Not only did it haunt her dreams, but – as I learnt during the process of researching my biography of the author – at times she became dangerously close to imagining committing the crime herself.

“Murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing,” Highsmith wrote in one of her diaries. “(Is it not, too, a way of gaining complete and passionate attention, for a moment, from the object of one’s attentions?)”