The Unusual Miss Highsmith

She kept snails as pets and had the reputation of setting them free on her dinner table if the occasion bored her.

She had only complaints about most of the people she dealt with.

She loathed Jews and blacks.

She once welcomed two guests to her house by throwing a dead rat into their bedroom.

She often invited people over to stay with her but usually neglected to serve them any proper food.

She could be extremely mean and rude even towards her close friends.

Not a pleasant lady, right? Well, that was the real-life persona of one of the greatest crime writers in the English language, Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995). She wrote some of the finest psychological thrillers of the second half of the 20th century, yet few people read her in her native country (the US) during her lifetime (she was even without a US publisher at one point!). Most film buffs know the notorious anti-hero she created, the amoral Thomas or Tom Ripley, but few would have read the great novels in which he appeared. That was the paradoxical life of Highsmith.

Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas and part of her formative period as a writer was spent at the legendary artists colony of Yaddo in New York state. She had a notorious love-hate relationship with her mother. Highsmith started her career as a writer of comic books but all her life she preferred to keep this phase of her career under wraps. Fame came to her early with the publication of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, in 1950. The legendary Alfred Hitchcock made the novel into one of his greatest-ever movies the following year and her name became well-known almost overnight.

Highsmith was a ravishing beauty early on, coveted by both men and women alike. But her lesbian tendencies came to the fore soon and that was the theme of her second novel, The Price of Salt, which she dared to publish only under a pseudonym. She would go on to have affairs with dozens of women (and a handful of men too) all through her life and that would influence her writings too - homosexual undertones were evident in most of what she wrote.

In 1955 appeared her most compelling creation, Tom Ripley, in what is generally regarded as Highsmith’s best and most famous novel, The Talented Mr Ripley. A slim volume, it would go on to influence several generations of crime writers and filmmakers. Ripley would appear again in four more novels, with the fifth and last one coming out in 1991. Ripley was the classic anti-hero, a sexually ambiguous psychopath who kills without remorse or guilt anyone standing in his path. But the strange thing is that we are rooting for him all the way and somehow he manages to get away each time, though he is suspected by many people, including the police.

Not surprisingly, Ripley would become the favourite of many auteurs and he is one of the enduring fictional and screen characters. One early big-screen version was 1960's Plein Soleil (titled Purple Noon in the English DVD release) in French with a young Alain Delon taking on the role of Ripley. The film most familiar to modern-day viewers would be the late Anthony Minghella’s stylish and classy version of The Talented Mr Ripley released in 1999; it had Matt Damon as Ripley with an all-star cast around him. Ripley has also been played by actors as varied as Dennis Hopper, John Malkovitch and Barry Pepper over the years.

Highsmith’s writing career flourished in the 1960s and the 1970s, as she produced some of the best work of her career during this time, like the novels The Blunderer, This Sweet Sickness, Deep Water and The Cry of the Owl. She was starting to base herself in Europe by now and she was far more popular there than back in her native country. If one of her crime novels sold 5,000 copies in the US she was sure of selling 10 times that number in Europe.

She also produced dozens of short stories, in several volumes, most of which were disconcerting and disturbing. Her view of the world was skewed and off-kilter – no wonder Graham Greene once famously described her as the “poet of apprehension”. No one could read her stories without a feeling of claustrophobia developing in them.

Sadly, towards the end of her life, Highsmith’s prejudices and biases started becoming more and more obvious. She spent her final years in France and Switzerland – though a very rich author by this time, she became more and more obsessed with money and taxes. But, despite her dislike of most people, she could still find well-wishers willing to look after her and to run her daily errands. Her famous beauty was long gone by this time, ravaged by the passage of years and the toll taken by her heavy drinking, smoking and poor eating habits. Her last few books also showed a drastic decline in quality. Highsmith died of aplastic anemia and cancer in Locarno, Switzerland, aged 74; she had built her last house there, after a lifetime of wanderings.

Two biographers have ventured to examine her life in recent years and their respective books are both extremely readable, albeit in different ways. Andrew Wilson’s Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (2003) is a conventional cradle-to-grave biography but is probably the more readable of the two. Joan Schenkar’s more acclaimed The Talented Miss Highsmith (2009) adopts a different tack altogether – it is made up of various essays about the various chapters of her life and relies heavily on the numerous cahiers (notebooks) , diaries and notes Highsmith left behind. Many great critics and writers have also examined her works in depth in recent times, including Michael Dirda and Jeanette Winterson. Dirda’s essay in The New York Review of Books on the five Ripley novels, titled “This Woman is Dangerous”, is almost as good as anything Highsmith herself wrote.

How will history regard Highsmith the writer? Probably very near the top as far as crime/thriller writers go, though her many admirers will argue that her stories were much closer to art than mere pulp. Her prose may have been flat and without many frills but the worlds she conjured up were full of dangers at every turn and utterly addictive. Highsmith might have been an unpleasant human being for most of her life but she was also a great chronicler of human lives. Maybe that is how we should remember her.

The end of Borders

Tomorrow (September 26, 2011) at 9pm, the curtain will finally go down for good on Borders in Singapore. Its second and smaller outlet at Parkway Parade is all set to close after a final discount sale over the weekend. With that will end a key chapter in the book retail landscape of Singapore. Borders’ demise had been on the cards for years but it is still a sad moment for book-lovers like myself.

I remember well my initial look at the iconic American bookstore in 2001 when I first visited Singapore – my uncle here took me to the flagship outlet at Wheelock Place on Orchard Road here and I was totally taken aback by the size of the store – it seemed to me like a treasure trove with hundreds and thousands of books and CDs and DVDs arranged in row after row. I could not believe my eyes. Never would I have imagine that exactly a decade later all this would be just a fond memory.

Borders was, for many years, an American institution. It was founded in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by two brothers (Tom and Louis Borders). It finally spread its wings in the late 1990s and interestingly their first international store was located in Singapore. The Wheelock Place outlet was a massive undertaking – spread over 32,000 square feet. Its opening shook up the book-retail industry in the city-state with smaller local operators like Popular and Times being forced to relook their sales strategies virtually overnight.

Borders subsequently opened dozens of stories overseas – in Japan, UK, Australia, New Zealand etc. At one point (in 2003) there were over 1,200 Borders stores worldwide. It seemed like a huge success story and it was – for a while. The Wheelock Place store had the classic Borders feel – one could sit and browse there freely for hours, the opening hours were long, there was the in-house café, it was a meeting-point for serious book-lovers and courting lovers alike and it was right in the most happening part of town. It was crowded with locals and tourists alike. Indeed, by 2006, this outlet was the most profitable of their branches worldwide. Borders soon opened its second store in Singapore, in 2007. All seemed fine.

But major changes were in store, and not all of it for the good. I started noticing that the CD section was being downsized with every passing month. I did not mind that too much because, after all, the primary attraction of Borders was the books they had, and the music on sale was always a bonus. But even the back-catalogue for most authors seemed skimpier than before. And there seemed no point asking the salespeople about many authors from the past – they seemed to have little clue about any of them. (My favourite test of a bookstore’s credentials is usually to ask them if they stocked PG Wodehouse’s classic books – if they failed to recognise even the name, I would immediately prophecy doom and gloom for them!).

Soon, another strange phenomenon was observable – Borders started sending out discount coupons by email every fortnight or so. In the beginning this seemed like an interesting sales ploy – but soon this seemed like a desperate measure to arrest the falling sales of books. Also, their focus on books seemed to be weakening fast – more and more gift items (soft toys, calendars) started cropping up in the stores and the arrangements of the books seemed to be getting messier every passing day.

It was understood by 2006 that Borders was losing big money. The e-book revolution was also taking its toll. The American side of things was fast losing steam with store after store closing down. But there was some hope for the Singapore outlets as it was understood that they were now being operated by an Australian firm, as a franchise. In February 2011 Borders announced it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy; the last store in the US shuttered its doors on September 18 this year.

The Wheelock Place store in Singapore suddenly closed down last August – leasing problems were said to be the immediate cause. Sadly it was evident that it would not open again and from then it became a guessing game to see how long the smaller outlet at Parkway Parade would stay open. A couple of clearance sales were held including the one last weekend. It was awfully sad to see the once-mighty store being reduced to a few shelves and people milling around to pick up books for bargains.

Yet, all is not lost on the books front – Borders’ main rival here in its heyday, Kinokuniya, is still going strong and looks as solid as ever. Interesting home-grown indie bookshops like Books Actually, Page One and Littered With Books have their own devoted fanbase and are holding their own for now. But the sudden decline and fall of Borders is a cautionary tale. Many of the giant megastores in Singapore – Tower Records and HMV spring to mind – have either totally disappeared or have downsized dramatically in the space of just a couple of years after looking formidable at one stage. Wonder what the book-retail scene will be like in 2020 … will there be a major book store even functioning by then?

Sherlock Holmes revisited

My favourite fictional character remains Sherlock Holmes, although a few others – Bertie Wooster, Tom Ripley, James Bond and Count Dracula – have staked their claims to my affections at various points in time. But Holmes, to me, is the most realistically fleshed-out fictional person of them all. For many Holmes fans, he is more real than imagined and it is very easy to visualise the great "consulting detective" being active at his familiar haunts at 221B Baker Street lodgings even as we speak.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories have always been a particular favourite of mine right from my childhood. They are the most treasured volumes in my book collection. I recently decided to re-read the whole canon – all 56 short stories and four novels – partly to see whether I would still find them as captivating as I once did. There are certain reading pleasures from one’s childhood that one finds quite boring later on in life – for me these include most of the Agatha Christie whodunits, Sportstar and Reader’s Digest, to mention a few. But the Holmes stories still retain the magic they have always held for me and seem almost as fresh now as they were on my initial reading. Of course not all the stories are of an equal standard (there are a few dull ones, especially from the last two collections) but the best of them are magnificent stuff and, overall, they set a pretty high standard for detective fiction.

A reader who is new to Holmes will end up at some stage with The Hound of the Baskervilles, the story most often regarded as the Holmes masterpiece. It was originally serialised inThe Strand Magazine in 1901-02 and published in book form in 1902. It is a short novel but it contains almost every reading pleasure within its pages – danger, action, an exhibition of Holmes’s celebrated deductive powers, atmosphere, suggestions of a supernatural beast, mysterious goings-on in the night, an escaped convict, a spine-tingling build-up, and a dramatic finale in the fog which no one who reads the story will ever forget.

Holmes and his faithful friend and colleague, Dr Watson, are at the peak of their powers here. Yet, unusually, Holmes is off-stage for most of the second act of the novel and we hear his mention only through Watson’s letters to him from the gloomy depths of Dartmoor. But Holmes’ presence is felt all through the book and like the shark in Jaws, his absence only strengthens the dramatic impact that he produces when he suddenly re-appears right in the middle of the action.

Conan Doyle was a great story-teller and a superb writer. The Hound is precisely calibrated, with not one scene out of place. The action is fast and furious and we move breathlessly from one chapter to another – the book is a great example of a novel that is difficult to put down, even if you know the outlines of the tale from its numerous pop-culture references. It is an adventure story, it is a gothic novel, it is a story of friendship and betrayal and loyalty and passions but for me the real key to its success is the atmosphere Conan’s Doyle writing creates. There is a feeling of dread throughout and one can almost feel the places being described with such detail. Will anyone forget Baskerville Hall or the great Grimpen Mire after reading about them? Unlikely.

Not surprisingly, there have been at least 24 screen adaptations of this classic Holmes story over the years, with varying degrees of success. But nothing ever matches the experience of reading the tale for the first time. I must have read it at least five times so far – the time was when I was in my early teens and it was my mother who first suggested it – and it is still as gripping to me as it has always been.

The Hound is the book I would most recommend to a young reader who asks me for suggestions of what to read because it contains everything a great story should have – a remarkable hero, a villain of the highest order, unforgettable side-characters, a spooky setting, a famous mansion, and, of course, the hound of the story’s title.

What are you waiting for, then? Get hold of the book and start reading it – or begin re-reading it, if you have already gone through it years ago (The Hound, like most classics, rewards multiple readings). Marvel in the magic of a classic story, superbly told and wonderfully written.

P.S. Some random thoughts on the other Holmes books:

A Study in Scarlet (1887): Holmes and Dr Watson make their debut. The second half comprises a lengthy background story, a device Conan Doyle uses in all his Holmes novels and also in some of his short stories.

The Sign of Four (1890): An exotic tale. It has a closed-room mystery, a missing treasure, an extraordinary villain with an even more colourful sidekick, and an unforgettable chase down the River Thames at the end. And the flashback set in India adds plenty of colour and intrigue.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891): The single best collection of Holmes short stories. The gems are all here: "A Scandal in Bohemia", "The Red-Headed League", "The Copper Beeches", "The Man with the Twisted Lip", and of course, the immortal "The Specked Band" (which is almost as famous as The Hound of the Baskervilles). A must-read for anyone remotely interested in adventure fiction!

Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1892): More famous tales from the canon like "Silver Blaze", "The Musgrave Ritual", and "The Final Problem" where Holmes fatally clashes with the “Napolean of Crime”, the arch-criminal Professor Moriarty. This, then, was supposed to be Holmes’ swansong but public demand ensured a comeback for the famed detective a few years later, as we all know.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1903): The dramatic way in which Holmes is reinstated at Baker Street is also the basis of one of the most exciting stories in the entire series ("The Empty House"). This collection also contains more famous stories like "The Solitary Cyclist", "The Six Napoleans" and "The Second Stain".

The Valley of Fear (1914): The most unusual Holmes novel and probably the least-known of the stories. Holmes is absent for the entire second half of the book and while it is still a fine work, Valley does not really have the feel of a typical Holmes story. But it does have its fans.

His Last Bow (1917): Not the strongest collection (the title story is quite dated, for instance) but there are some quirky and wonderful off-beat tales here, of which the best are "The Bruce-Partington Plans" and "The Dying Detective". "The Devil’s Foot" is also “singular and has certain points of interest”, as Holmes would have put it in his cold, unemotional way.

The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1927): The final collection. Probably the best-known story here is "Thor Bridge" which is right up there with the best. The stories here are much darker in tone and have come a long way from the early ones, not surprising when you think that these were written some 40 years after A Study in Scarlet. Conan Doyle tries out some experiments in style also - for instance, Holmes himself narrates two of the stories while another one is described in the third person.

The 'classic commercial writer'

I have just finished reading Andrew Wilson's enjoyable new biography of Harold Robbins, cheekily titled Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex (2007). I had thoroughly enjoyed Wilson's earlier effort on the great Patricia Highsmith (Beautiful Shadow) and this was another fast but entertaining read.

Most people who read fiction for enjoyment would have come across a Robbins novel at some point in their lives. Some would have been tempted to read at least a few of his enormously popular potboilers with their garish names and seedy connotations. Even in India, where reading trends appear and disappear quickly, Robbins' books remain almost as popular now as they were in the 1970s and 1980s.

"The godfather of the airport novel" was just one of the many nicknames that was attached to Robbins. Airport novels are exactly that - one picks them up at an airport bookstore, reads them during the waiting period for the flight and then chucks them away or store them in a dusty cupboard to be forgotten forever. They are expected to have no lasting literary or artistic value. They will win no literary prizes for great prose or flights of imagination. Robert Ludlum, Sydney Sheldon, Arthur Hailey - these are all classic examples of highly popular airport novelists. But, even among these masters of pulp fiction, Robbins reigned supreme.

By the early 1970s, Robbins was probably the world's best-selling author. He published over 20 books which were translated into 32 languages and sold over 750 million copies. Wilson goes into Robbins' colourful life in detail - how he made up elaborate stories about his early life, how he made and spent around US$50 million during his 81 years, his non-stop womanising and gambling, his rampant use of recreational drugs, his famous parties and orgies, his relationships with celebrities and fellow writers, his up-market pads in the US and France, his 14 cars, his luxury yacht and, of course, why he was such a publishing phenomenon (in the paperback sphere). It is an extrardinary story, rivalling the outlandish plots in any of Robbins' books.

Interestingly, Wilson makes it clear that Robbins was a pretty decent wordsmith at least in the early part of his literary career. His A Stone for Danny Fisher (1952) was praised by critics (who later made a point to bash his every best-seller with glee) - it was later the basis for the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole (1958). Most of Robbins' novels made it to the big screen and television, with varying degrees of success. Many of them were modelled on real-life larger-than-life characters - for instance, The Carpetbaggers (1961), one of his most popular books, was loosely based on the life of tycoon Howard Hughes.

While not even his numerous fans would claim Robbins was a great writer, what few would deny was that he was a born storyteller. Spinning tales (some tall, some short) was what he did best. Robbins could also write very fast during his peak years - he would type out a best-seller in just three months and then take the rest of the year off to party and enjoy life. Because of his prolific output, he was dubbed the "man with the smoking typewriter".

But, towards the end of his life, Robbins grew bored with the writing process. He became sloppy and careless - the same adjectives started to be used in consecutive sentences, in many cases. In one of his later novels, the characters in the first half of the story didn't seem to have much resemblance to the characters in the second half! When his publisher pointed out this discrepancy out to Robbins, the writer reportedly replied that he couldn't care less - his readers would never notice such fine details, he predicted. And that was exactly what happened - not one of his fans wrote in to complain ...

Robbins' decline started in the early 1980s - he suffered a stroke that badly affected his writing and general health. His later books consequently suffered and, to keep the cheques coming in, he had to seek the help of ghost-writers to finish his final few novels. It was not probably the way Robbins would have seen his final years played out but then he never had any illusions about his literary legacy. Robbins never wrote a classic in his life but he could be called the "classic commercial writer" - someone who wrote to entertain the common man and whose main aim was to make as much money as possible from that process.

Raymond Chandler - a one-in-a-million writer

Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888-1959) was an extraordinary writer. He wrote stories in the detective/crime genre but many critics regard him as a great literary craftsman. I had heard about his unique writing style even in my teens but never got a chance to read his books till recently. I have been reading his first six Philip Marlowe novels through the last few weeks and it has been quite a voyage of discovery.
Chandler's private eye is as different from Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot as possible. While Holmes and Poirot are quaint characters trapped in their respective time periods, Marlowe's world is much more closer to ours, in spite of the fact that stories about him are mostly set in the California/Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s.
What sets the Marlowe stories apart? To start with, there is the "diamond-hard" prose that Chandler perfected, along with the whiplash dialogue. Chandler is brilliant when it comes to descriptions and character development. I don't usually read books just for the language - for me the plot and storyline are as important as the language. But there is rarely a dull page in any of the Marlowe novels - the prose fairly crackles with imagination and terrific sentences.
A sample of Chandler's most memorable writing. They are so highly-regarded that fans describe them as "Chandlerisms":
"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window." - Farewell, My Lovely
"From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away." - The High Window
"His thin, claw-like hands were folded loosely on the rug, purple-nailed. A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock." - The Big Sleep
"Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." - Farewell, My Lovely .
And perhaps the most famous couple of sentences written by Chandler:
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world." - The Simple Art of Murder (essay)
Chandler's first Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep (1939), changed the face of detective fiction for ever. It was such a stunning change from the tame and predictable writing the genre had seen till then. The most interesting thing was that few people could make sense of the convoluted plot! That was also a Chandler trademark - for instance, when I read The Little Sister (1949), I couldn't make head or tail of what was going on - characters kept appearing and disappearing, everyone seemed to be double-crossing everybody else and, by the end of it all, even when Marlowe seems to have sewn up the loose ends, I was left scratching my head to figure out the different plot strands and the many twists and turns.
It was said that even Chandler sometimes didn't know what was going on in his stories - there is the famous story about how the makers of the 1946 Hollywood version of The Big Sleep wondered what had really happened to one of the side-characters - so they wired Chandler, who replied that he also didn't have a clue! But the vibrancy of the prose is such that the reader keeps turning the pages even when he/she doesn't have much of an idea of what exactly what is happening around Marlowe.
Marlowe himself is an engaging protagonist - he's cynical, brave, hard-edged, a loner and always quick with a wisecrack and a quip. He is constantly lied to by lovely women and treated badly by corrupt cops and colourful villains. His world is a seedy one, full of sudden death and dark secrets - murders seem to happen around constantly. Marlowe is constantly in danger and physically assaulted any number of times.
How did such an amazing writer as Chandler turn out just about half-a-dozen books in a long life? He seemed to have arrived at the top of the heap without any development - The Big Sleep demonstrated that this was a writer who was already a finished product. He wrote that novel when he was over 50, after having written a number of "hard-boiled" short stories for American pulp magazines like Black Mask. Chandler was influenced heavily by the writing style of Dashiell Hammett - the latter's The Maltese Falcon and its hero, Sam Spade, was the template of Marlowe and his world. Sadly, Hammett is largely forgotten nowadays while Chandler's reputation has been growing year after year.
Interestingly, Chandler cannibalised many of his own early short stories for plots and situations for his latter-day Marlowe novels. Only at the very end of his writing career did Chandler seem to lose his way (hastened, no doubt, by a severe drinking problem and the death of his much-older wife) but his fans would claim any day that even Chandler's B-grade efforts were a lot better than the best writings of many of his competitors.
Chandler was also a top Hollywood script-writer in the 1940s and 1950s, though he had a difficult time in that profession. Much has been made out of his falling-out with the great Alfred Hitchcock during the making of the master's Strangers On a Train in 1951. Theirs were two big egos which were never going to coexist with each other in any way. Despite such setbacks, Chandler's scripts for noir films like Double Indemnity and The Blue Dahlia are still highly regarded.
Chandler was also a gifted essayist and letter-writer - his 1944 essay The Simple Art of Murder is one of the most famous of the 20th century - in it, he claimed that the American brand of hard-boiled detective fiction was far more realistic than the genteel world of British writers like Agatha Christie.
Chandler's influence on the detective/crime genre itself was enormous but it can also be argued that he was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, period. No writer has ever bested his style, though many have tried imitating him. Chandler was as distinctive as his best-known creation was.

Up close with some favourite authors

I have been reading some of the biographies written about my favourite authors in the last few weeks and it has been a wonderful journey of discovery. In some cases, the lives of these famous authors were far more interesting than the works they created. This was especially true in the case of Truman Capote. It can be argued that the creator of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's led a life that was so colourful and so extraordinary that his fictional characters struggled to match up. Gerald Clarke's definitive Capote biography, as well as George Plimpton's juicy collection of opinions/anecdotes from friends and rivals, give us a picture of a writer who was also an incorrigible gossip and man-about-town. Capote was also selfish and highly manipulative. But he was someone who was born to write, even though his eventual output was surprisingly far less than what one would have expected from a writer who made a mark so early on in his career.
I also read two biographies of W Somerset Maugham, of which only one (by Robert Calder) is worth mentioning. Maugham - who was equally good at writing plays, short stories, novels and essays - was also the most widely travelled writer of his generation. One needs to follow his footprints to properly understand where he got the ideas for his stories. Calder achieves this marvellously well. Maugham was also famously prolific and he was active till his mid-80s. The account of his senile final years, though, makes for sad reading; this is the part of the Calder book that is most movingly written.
Andrew Wilson's acclaimed Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith takes a look at the life and times of an under-rated writer. Highsmith, memorably described as "the poet of apprehension" by Graham Greene, was never really appreciated in her native America during her lifetime. But her unsettling works of crime fiction are now slowly getting well-deserved attention, especially after the release of Anthony Minghella's 1999 screen version of Highsmith's best novel, The Talented Mr Ripley. Highsmith's life was not as eventful as Maugham's or as colourful as Capote's but the story of what factors influenced her fiction makes for very interesting reading.
It is fascinating to note that all three literary luminaries mentioned above - Capote, Maugham and Highsmith - were well-known homosexuals. The fact that they were "queer" influenced their writings in subtle ways - all three, though, took care not to play up or write about their natural inclinations in their books (Maugham was especially careful in this regard) and, except for Highsmith's overtly homosexual novel The Price of Salt (or Carol), there are very few instances where one can say that they wrote about "unnatural love".
A very different kind of writer was crime fiction great Raymond Chandler. He started writing crime novels only when he was 50 and then, in a short space of a few years, created some unforgettable works, mostly featuring private eye Phillip Marlowe. Chandler rewrote the rules of "hard-boiled crime fiction" and his Marlowe novels are highly regarded both by critics and the reading public. They have never lost their appeal. Tom Hiney's Chandler biography is not the most detailed or comprehensive but is useful as a beginner's guide to the life of this unique author.
Charles J Shields' Mockingbird is a profile of Harper Lee, who is famous for having produced just one stunning book (the acclaimed To Kill a Mockingbird). Most of Shield's narrative deals with how Lee's masterpiece was written and of her friendship with childhood mate Capote. The reasons as to why Lee never produced anything after her debut novel is not made very clear by Shields; also, the last part of his book suffers from having too little material to work with.
Paul Alexander's much-criticised biography of the famed literary hermit, J D Salinger, is rather similiar to the Shields book on Lee. Alexander traces the early part of Salinger's life very well and relates how he became the hottest writer in the US with the release of the cult favourite, The Catcher in the Rye, in 1951. Salinger, portrayed as a disturbed and strange individual throughout the book, soon got tired of the unceasing attention from fans and academics and decided to withdraw fully from the real world. He has been famously described as "the last private man in America" and is notorious for his ultra-reclusive nature. Salinger says he writes only for himself and the literary world has wondered for years whether he has several manuscripts stashed away in his house. The writer speculates whether Salinger's decision to become a recluse is a PR master stroke or whether he genuninely detests contact with the outside world. Alexander also examines a dark side of Salinger's personality - his obsession with young girls, both in his fiction and in real life.
A magisterial biography of the traditional kind is Robert McCrum's fine Wodehouse: A Life. As one may expect, the most interesting part of the narrative deals with Wodehouse's foolish and misguided decision during World War II to make some (typically breezy) radio broadcasts from Germany. Wodehouse's life, otherwise, was that of a highly disciplined writer who knew exactly what his strengths were. Like his contemporary Maugham, Wodehouse had a long and very prolific career and he was also equally at home in various genres.
Some of the writers mentioned here (Maugham, Wodehouse, Highsmith) had long and very productive careers, while two (Salinger, Lee) had only a couple of glorious moments in the sun. Capote and Chandler shone brightly despite the relative brevity of their output. But all of them were extraordinary craftspeople and, after reading about their lives in some detail, I now have a renewed appreciation of their art.

Classic works of horror

Why does horror literature attract some readers so much? What is it about dark and spooky things that so captures a reader's mind? That is a question that even a best-selling horror writer will be hard-pressed to answer.
Horror was long seen as a genre that was close to trash or even lower than that. Though a seminal novel of horror like Bram Stoker's Dracula was long regarded as a classic piece of writing, horror never got the respect it deserved till the advent of Stephen King in the mid-1970s. King, almost overnight, changed the rules of the game and made horror fiction a genre to reckon with. Many writers followed in his wake with varying degrees of success.
Let us have a look at some of the best books and stories of the genre. Of course, the list will have to be restricted to the ones I have read so far ... First, the Top 11 (in chronological order), as I can't seem to make up my mind as to which of these to leave out to make the list a Top 10 one!
1. Dracula by Bram Stoker
Any listing of horror fiction will have to start with this classic tale of the vampire count. The narrative is told through diary entries, letters and other innovative methods but even now, many decades after it was first published, the story of the blood-thirsty Count Dracula is a gripping read. This gothic tale inspired a host of vampire stories and Count Dracula has gone on to become one of the most famous characters of fiction.
2. The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson
The mother of all haunted-house novels and a highly influential work. However, I was not all that impressed by this book and for me, the definitive Shirley Jackson horror work remains her macabre short story, The Lottery (1948).
3. Psycho (1959) by Robert Bloch
Bloch is one of the finest writers I have ever read and this short novel was easily his best work. Norman Bates became, like Dracula, an unforgettable fictional character. Alfred Hitchcock added to the story's fame through his memorable movie adaptation in 1960. Sadly, Bloch is an author who is hardly remembered these days.
4. Rosemary's Baby (1967) by Ira Levin
This is a horrifying tale of satanism and the occult set smack in the middle of New York city. The movie adaptation by Roman Polanski added to the reputation of the original book. Rosemary's Baby is so beautifully written that it is one of the books in this list that can be easily described as "unputdownable". Levin's sequel to his best novel, Son of Rosemary was, however, atrocious and proved that lightning never strikes twice!
5. The Stepford Wives (1972) by Ira Levin
Not as well-known as Rosemary's Baby but this novel, in my opinion, comes almost close to the former for its sheer story-telling quality. It's just over a 100 pages long but is far more effective than novels that are hundreds of pages long. Levin hits his creative peak with this superb tale that mixes horror and social satire with devastating effect.
6. 'Salem's Lot (1975) by Stephen King
The "King of Horror" decided to make his second novel a study of vampirism in a small American town. It was his own homage to Dracula . The result was a horror classic, a novel that King himself would never better in his many novels after that.
7. The Shining (1977) by Stephen King
Arguably King's most famous horror novel. It became even more famous when Stanley Kubrick adapted it for the big screen in 1979 with Jack Nicholson in the lead role. In some ways, it is an old-fashioned tale of a haunted building (to be more precise, a hotel). A must-read for fans of the genre.
8. The House Next Door (1978) by Anne Rivers Siddons
Siddons, a writer of romance novels set in the American deep south, tried her hand at the horror genre just once early on in her career and the result was this gem of a book. Here, interestingly, the house is haunted, of course, but the difference from the traditional approach is that the haunted house is not an old one where unspeakable crimes have happened in the past. Rather, this is a house that is newly built but it still harbours an evil, malignant presence that affects all who come in contact with it.
9. The Woman in Black (1983) by Susan Hill
Easily the best ghost story I have read so far. It has every ingredient of a classic spooky tale - great writing, a heavy atmosphere where one can imagine great tragedies happening, all the props of a ghost story (haunted house, a marshy, desolate environment, things that go bump in the night, a local tragedy), and a shattering twist at the very end. The edition I read had just 130+ pages, showing that you don't have to write millions of words to tell a memorable tale.
10. The Ring (1991) by Koji Suzuki
Suzuki is Asia's answer to Stephen King and The Ring was his major contribution to the horror genre. The book's fame was cemented in the West when Hollywood adapted it for the big screen. But the film version did not do justice to the original novel. The writing style is not that great but it is still a distinctive story.
11. A Simple Plan (1993) by Scott Smith
Smith has written just two novels in his comparative short career so far but this debut novel was an immediate attention-catcher. It has a deceptively simple premise but, like Levin's and Bloch's best works, the writing style is precise and calibrated. A chilling and brilliant piece of work.

Honourable mentions (in no particular order):

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
The Rats by James Herbert
A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin
Pet Sematary by Stephen King
Misery by Stephen King
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
The Ruins by Scott Smith