Product Description

Melinda Van Allen is beautiful, rebellious, tempestuous and sexy. And unfortunately for wealthy socialite Vic Van Allen, she is his wife. An incorrigible flirt, Melinda spares no opportunity to flaunt her many lovers to her husband. In response, Vic doesn't miss an opportunity to let them know that he's the jealous type. When Malcolm McCrae, one of Melinda's exes, is murdered in the city, Vic doesn't hesitate to suggest to her latest paramour that he might have been responsible. But as rumours about Vic's nasty streak begin to spread amongst their friends, fiction and reality begin to converge. And it's only a matter of time before Vic really does have blood on his hands.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118398 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Review
'Highsmith writes about men like a spider writing about flies' Observer 'An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there's nothing quite like it' Boston Globe 'The outstanding merit of Deep Water is the dexterity with which it develops the psychopath's portrait from the first faint agreeable outline to the full dark horrific colours of schizophrenia. If you read crime stories at all, or perhaps especially if you don't, you should read Deep Water' Sunday Times

About the Author
Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921. Her first novel, Strangers On A Train, was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955, was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll by the Mystery Writers of America and introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, who was to appear in many of her later crime novels. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously just over a month later.

Customer Reviews

As good as the Ripley novels.
If your only experience of Patricia Highsmith is the Ripley novels, and you're looking for more, you should definitely pick up this book. Deep Water was her first novel after 'The Talented Mr Ripley', and is a similar suspensful and psychological study of murder. I'm about three quarters of the way through Highsmith's books, and this is my new favourite.

The classic Highsmith ingredients are there: the finely observed, almost mundane domestic setting (which feels like a social history of 1950s US middle class life); the matter of fact, and therefore profoundly shocking way her killer switches between domestic routine, murder and back again; the stupidity/complicity of small town neighbours, and so on. The final few chapters also provide some fine moments of suspense: we know something's going to happen, we know where it's going to happen, we know who it's going to happen to, but we don't know exactly how it is going to unfold.

So get this one, and then move on to 'Cry of the Owl', 'The Blunderer' and 'Edith's Diary'.

High and Low
As with her better known Ripley novels, in Deep Water (a welcome reissue from Bloomsbury in a handsome edition), Patricia Highsmith gives us a portrayal of a killer who is not entirely unsympathetic: or at least (as with Tom Ripley), it seems to the reader that the people who suffer at his hand are a lot worse than he is... Here, she sets Victor Van Allen, a small publisher with an independent income, against his vampish wife Melinda, or, as the blurb puts it:

"Melinda Van Allen is beautiful, rebellious, tempestuous and sexy. Unfortunately for wealthy socialite Vic Van Allen, she is his wife."

When one of Melinda's lovers is murdered, Van Allen seizes the opportunity to frighten off another by telling him that he, Van Allen, was the murderer. No-one believes him, but word gets around, and soon enough, Van Allen finds himself the true possessor of the title. The transition from wronged husband to killer seems to us logical, fluent and plausible, and our sympathy is, if not unequivocally with Van Allen, certainly never with the victims (though Highsmith dextrously forces this by never delving into the reactions of those left behind: the other victims of any murder). She is more interested in exploring what makes a man do these things, and in interesting us in it too, by making the books so devourably readable. "She writes about men like a spider writing about flies," said one critic, and it's a sticky, addictive web once you're in.

Gripping
No one touches Ms Highsmith for sheer tension. I think we have to accept that she was one of the greatest novelists of the last century.