Partners in crime | 29 November 2018

I know nothing about Patricia Highsmith. The acclaimed American author wrote the kind of Sunday-night crime thrillers that put me to sleep. Her best-known creation, the suave psychopath Thomas Ripley, has spawned a number of films that I’ve carefully avoided. But ignorance is an ideal starting point for Switzerland, by Joanna Murray-Smith, a brilliantly nasty comedy that features Highsmith in 1995 when she was past her artistic best. What a piece of work. A foul-mouthed, booze-soaked, chain-smoking misanthrope squatting in a glass-fronted hermitage in the mountains with nothing but a typewriter, a whisky bottle and an Alpine panorama for company. (Actually, it sounds quite tempting, put like that.)

Her solitude is broken by a New York yuppie, Edward, on a mission from her publisher to secure a final instalment in the Ripley series. Edward whops the contract down on the table. Highsmith orders him out. But he stands his ground. We learn that he’s not the first emissary to assail the dragon in her lair.