In Ticino, Patricia Highsmith received a visit from master assassin Tom Ripley. And wrote her last book

It's Christmas, and she's wondering how to get rid of a corpse. "Unattended packages at Orly Airport are destroyed after 20 minutes," Patricia Highsmith writes in her notebook on December 25, 1987. But she's not satisfied with that. She wants to know more: "How destroyed? Submerged in water? I have to find out." When it comes to corpses, nothing can be left to chance. Police security measures are the best protection for a murderer: "You could chop a corpse into four or five pieces and stuff them in travel bags," she reflects.

That shouldn't be easy. But Patricia Highsmith knew a thing or two about corpses. She was sixty-six, a famous author, and had written twenty novels in which dozens of people were killed. Beaten to death, poisoned, stabbed, strangled. Out of jealousy, greed, rage. Sometimes also emotionless, out of cold calculation. Indifferent, as if a violent death were something entirely natural. Often, we don't learn exactly how the victims die. Because the author isn't interested in it.

The crimes aren't the focus of Highsmith's books. They occur, sometimes almost by chance. Who committed them is predetermined. Highsmith follows the perpetrators. "I can think of nothing more apt to fire the imagination than the thought—the fact—that any person you pass on the street could be a sadist, a compulsive thief, or even a murderer," she once said. Whether perpetrators are punished didn't matter to her. She found justice boring: "Neither life, nor fate, nor nature cares whether justice is done."

The problem of the corpse, which she was mulling over at Christmas, seems to have somehow been resolved. But the story continued to fester in Highsmith's mind. For seven years, she had lived in Ticino, in Aurigeno in the Maggia Valley. She liked the village: "It's a place full of old houses, with simple people and a few tourists in the summer," she wrote to a friend about Aurigeno. But she found the house she lived in too dark and uncomfortable, especially in winter.

In the early 1980s, she moved from France to Switzerland out of frustration with the French tax authorities. Her choice of residence was not accidental. Her publishing house was in Zurich. A friend lived in Ticino. Highsmith hardly had a close connection to Switzerland, but she valued it. "Whenever I feel desperately homesick, but not so desperate that I would spend several hundred dollars traveling to America, I go to Switzerland," she once wrote in the 1950s. Switzerland is like a club: "Not everyone wants to be a member. But for those who like order and a quiet life, it is the right place."

Highsmith valued the quiet life. And the order, too. She'd had enough chaos in her life. She was born in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas, as an unwanted child. Her mother drank turpentine when she realized she was pregnant because she wanted an abortion. Before Patricia's birth, she divorced. The child went to live with her grandmother. Then her mother remarried, and the family moved to New York. "My family life was a mess," Highsmith later recalled. Constant arguments. Her mother and stepfather didn't get along. Patricia was repeatedly shipped off to live with her grandmother: "I never knew where I was."

Highsmith once said she'd never experienced anything that could have given her confidence in relationships. While studying at Barnard College in New York, she spent her nights partying in the bars and clubs of Greenwich Village, where the gay elite congregated. She wore pants, smoked, and drank excessively. She was attractive, desirable, and full of life. But also withdrawn, anxious, and sad. When she was twenty, she wrote in her notebook: "I don't believe in happiness in human life."

After graduating, she worked as a copywriter in comic book studios. She wrote speech bubbles for stories about superheroes and fantasy characters. She also wrote short stories and worked on novels. And dreamed of a life as a successful writer. In 1948, she received a scholarship to a New York artists' colony. There, she felt comfortable and enjoyed the freedom. She flirted with women and men, became engaged to a young Englishman, and finished her first novel, "Strangers on a Train." It was acquired by a renowned publisher and made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock.

That was her breakthrough. Patricia Highsmith was a recognized author and began her second novel, "The Price of Salt." A love story. Perhaps the only story by Patricia Highsmith in which love doesn't end in disaster, but is pure happiness. A love story between two women. That was impossible in America at the time. Highsmith published the book under the name Claire Morgan. It became a cult novel. Before she wrote the first pages, she began psychoanalysis to cure herself of her homosexuality.

It wasn't until 40 years later that "The Price of Salt" was published under Patricia Highsmith's name, with the title "Carol." Highsmith discontinued therapy after just a few weeks. "According to all Platonic laws," she wrote in her diary, "I am a man and I love women." Her relationship life remained a roller coaster, and she began traveling. To Mexico. To Europe. By the early 1950s, she was more or less constantly on the move, including in Switzerland. She described Zurich as "very neat, bourgeois, and opulent," and the drive over the Gotthard Pass made her dizzy.

She fell in love. Again and again. Affairs. Highs, crises, breakups. In Munich in 1951, she met Ellen Hill. "Ellen and I argue or misunderstand each other in every conversation," Highsmith noted in her diary, "and perhaps I was too drunk to realize we were falling in love." The two were a couple for four years. A hectic ups and downs. Ellen attempted suicide several times, one of them in Highsmith's presence. They remained friends until Highsmith's death.

In 1952, Highsmith and Ellen Hill traveled through Europe. From Paris to the Côte d'Azur, then to Florence, Ischia, and then Positano. One morning, from the hotel balcony, Highsmith saw a young man walking along the beach. Wearing shorts and sandals, a beach towel over his shoulder. She didn't record the scene in her notebook or diary. In 1990, she recalled it in a magazine essay: "He seemed deep in thought, perhaps worried. Had he argued with someone? What was going through his mind?"

She saw him for a few minutes. And then never again. But she never forgot him. He became the nucleus of the character of Tom Ripley. A master assassin. More than that: Ripley is perhaps the most sinister murderer in world literature. Cultured, a dandy, well-versed in art and music, a pleasant conversationalist. And at the same time, an unscrupulous man who takes what he wants, even if he has to kill for it. Because he is convinced it is his right.

Three years after the trip to Italy, Highsmith introduced Tom Ripley for the first time. In the novel "The Talented Mr. Ripley," he kills two people, forges a will, and thus lays the foundation for a financially secure life. And Highsmith manages to make readers like Ripley. They're glad when his crimes go unexposed, even if they're repelled by his slick opportunism, by the fact that, for him, good and evil are merely a matter of perspective and violence is a legitimate means of gaining an advantage.

Ripley becomes Highsmith's most successful character. He is the protagonist of five of her novels. And sometimes he is present even in the books in which he doesn't appear. He portrays Highsmith's typical murderers, who don't give their actions much thought and consider morality a noble but dispensable accessory. Since he appeared on the beach in Positano, Ripley has never completely left Patricia Highsmith. Sometimes she signed letters with "Ripley."

In the winter of 1987, he reported back to Aurigeno. Behind the brief Christmas Day note is Tom Ripley, even though he isn't named: Orly Airport is close to Villeperce-sur-Seine, the fictional home Highsmith had assigned him. And disposing of corpses is Ripley's specialty. A few days after Christmas, he was there in person. At the beginning of January, Highsmith jotted down: "Ripley is going crazy." A year later, she began writing "the new Ripley," and a good two years later, the first draft of "Ripley Under Water" was finished.

It was to be the last Ripley novel. Work progressed more slowly than Highsmith was used to. In Aurigeno, she had what she needed: peace and quiet to write. But she felt ill. She felt exhausted, irritable, and depressed. The previous spring, doctors had discovered lung cancer, and she had undergone surgery in London. It was successful. She gained hope and decided to look for a new house. She considered moving back to France, even traveling to Montcourt, where she had lived for a long time, but couldn't find anything suitable.

Through friends, she became aware of a property in Tegna. Three villages further towards Locarno, slightly elevated, at the entrance to the Onsernone Valley. Brighter and friendlier than in Aurigeno. But expensive. Highsmith's friends agreed that she had paid far too much for the property. She didn't care. She had Zurich architect Tobias Ammann design a house according to her ideas. A house like a fortress, made of light-colored exposed brick that wraps around the building like a tank. Small windows, a narrow entrance door. "Hitler's bunker," a friend who came to visit for the first time is said to have called it. "A powerful house," Patricia Highsmith herself said.

She seems to have felt at home there. As much as she could. The house was bright inside. Its furnishings were sparse but welcoming; Highsmith had crafted some of the furniture himself. From the garden, in which not a single flower grew, one had a view of the mountains. Highsmith never found peace there. She was often on the road. To Italy, Morocco, and London. Negotiating film rights. She was one of the most famous authors and accordingly in demand. For readings, speeches, and interviews. At award ceremonies and book fairs. It was too much for her. She was ill. She felt too tired to work.

Nevertheless, she planned a new novel. It was to be set in Zurich, in a gay bar. A love story with a murder, in which the author soon lost interest and which ultimately led nowhere. Highsmith no longer had the energy to do the on-site research and delegated it to a friend. When her mother died in March 1991, she didn't travel to the funeral. A year later, she went to Texas one last time to visit her cousin Dan. After returning to Ticino, her health problems worsened, and her doctor's visits became more frequent.

Highsmith retreated to her house and worked on the novel, which would only be published after her death under the title "Small G – A Summer Idyll." It was a strangely floating book, a story that seemingly drifted aimlessly. Highsmith could no longer manage her usual writing rate of eight pages a day. It angered her, and she was dissatisfied. She feared for her possessions, making criminal suggestions on the phone to her New York lawyer about how to increase her fortune. Sometimes she thought people were after her money. And she constantly pondered how to settle her estate.

She lived alone, surrounded by her cats. And snails, which she had developed a great affection for even as a young woman. She bred them devotedly and always took a few with her on her travels. Or so she said. When she received visitors, she was hospitable—at least as long as it was beer and whiskey. For food, she would serve herring or dairy products at most. Things that could also be fed to the cats.

Her health worsened. The cancer returned, and doctors diagnosed anemia; her bone marrow was producing too few blood cells. She needed chemotherapy, but that would have caused even more damage to her bone marrow. There was no way out. When it became clear that Highsmith could no longer live alone in the house, her publisher arranged for a housekeeper: Bruno Sager, a former music agent, who kept the house in good condition, did the shopping, and cooked. For four hundred francs a month, Highsmith reluctantly accepted.

Sager lived with Highsmith for six months. She was ill, weak, and depressed. She ate little and drank heavily. She had quit smoking on doctor's advice. Work progressed slowly. Highsmith walked through the house with a gloomy expression. "I thought she was angry until I realized that was her normal expression," Sager later recounted. Their interaction was very friendly. He couldn't talk to her about politics, though.

Highsmith's political views were extreme, absurd, and driven by prejudice. Above all, by hatred of Israel and Jews. She called the Holocaust a "semicaust," arguing that the Nazis had, after all, killed "only half" of the Jews. She spoke spitefully of virtually all of her publishers except Daniel Keel, and would often add, "He's a Jew, you know." At a dinner with friends, the conversation turned to the Shoah. Highsmith is said to have rolled up the sleeve of her sweater and written a number on her forearm with a ballpoint pen. Then she laughed out loud.

Even in the last months of her life, Patricia Highsmith showed her two faces: a misanthrope who could also be charming. "She wasn't nice, and she was rarely polite," wrote her biographer Joan Schenkar. The artist Ingeborg Lüscher, who was a friend of hers, describes Highsmith as loving and compassionate. She was hospitable, enjoyed making others laugh, and cared touchingly for her friends, even when she herself was ill.

The last housekeeper to live with Highsmith after Bruno Sager paints a very different picture. In a recent article for an American magazine, Elena Gosalvez Blanco described the atmosphere in the house as oppressive. Highsmith was unfriendly and insulted her over trivial things. Her boyfriend wasn't allowed into the house, and Highsmith made scenes if she was gone for more than an hour and forbade her from using the telephone in the house: "Sometimes I thought she was going to kill me. She behaved like a jealous lover."

Perhaps she really was. Elena awakened memories in Highsmith. Of the woman she herself had once been. Of women she had loved. On February 4, 1995, Patricia Highsmith died in a clinic in Locarno. Until the very end, she had plans for new books. And until the very end, Tom Ripley was with her. On the cover of her last notebook, she had jotted down titles for new Ripley novels: "Ripley's Happiness," "Ripley and the Voice of the Dead." She crossed out the second title.