The blunderer

With the Savage Humor of Evelyn Waugh and the macabre sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe, Patricia Highsmith brought a distinct twentieth-century acuteness to her prolific body of fiction. In her more than twenty novels, psychopaths lie in wait amid the milieu of the mundane, in the neighbor clipping the hedges or the spouse asleep next to you at night. Now, Norton continues the revival of this noir genius with two more of her lost masterpieces: The Blunderer, first published in 1953 and hailed as her finest novel, about the rise and fall of a faithful suburban husband who plots his wife's demise in fantasies gruesome and eerily serene; and a later work from 1983, People Who Knock on the Door, a tale about blind faith and the slippery notion of justice that lies beneath the peculiarly American veneer of righteousness. Both novels, out of print for years, again attest to Highsmith's reputation as "the poet of apprehension" (Graham Greene).