Patricia Highsmith, Writer Of Crime Tales, Dies at 74

Patricia Highsmith, the American writer whose tales of gentlemen murderers and psychological intrigue were often explorations of her own obsessions, died yesterday at Carita hospital in Locarno, Switzerland, near the village where she had lived since 1982. She was 74.

No cause of death was given by hospital officials, The Associated Press reported.

Ms. Highsmith, who was born in Fort Worth and raised in Manhattan, spent most of her life in Europe, living first in England, then France and finally in southern Switzerland.

Ms. Highsmith published 20 novels and seven short-story collections and was best known for creating Tom Ripley, a highly mannered murderer who was the central character in five novels.

Her first book, "Strangers on a Train," was published in 1950 after being rejected by six publishers. The tale of two men, Bruno and Guy, who meet on a train and make a murder pact, was made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.

Ms. Highsmith often said that she disliked being classified as a crime writer and many reviewers tended to agree. Graham Greene, with whom Ms. Highsmith frequently corresponded, called her a "writer who has created a world of her own -- a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger."

Julian Symons, the dean of British crime writing, who first promoted her work, wrote that "one closes most of her books -- and her equally powerful and chilling short stories -- with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had imagined."

Ms. Highsmith's tales often involved people whose lives intersect briefly and who become involved in apparently harmless games that lead to violence: a man who buys and furnishes a house for a woman happily married to another man, a loner in New York City who finds a man's wallet on the street and invades the man's life.

Her character Tom Ripley is an intelligent, cultured gentleman who dabbles in art, music and, occasionally, murder. A review of her work in The London Times Literary Supplement in 1975 said that she used Ripley as a means to map the moral consciousness of the immoral, to portray people who obsessively examine their motives and morals but for whom there is always something basic missing.

Ms. Ripley's early life was marred by marital discord between her mother and stepfather. She was raised mostly in Greenwich Village by a grandmother who taught her to read when she was only 2. She made no secret of the fact that she did not like her mother, whom she did not see during the last two decades of the mother's life.

She lived alone in a 200-year-old farmhouse near Locarno surrounded by books and cats. In her 1975 short stories "The Animal-Lovers Book of Beastly Murder," the people were killed by animals.

She rarely visited the United States and, possibly as a result, her books were always more popular in Europe and in Asia than they were in America.

Ms. Highsmith had no known survivors.