1 Patricia Highsmith, an American crime writer whose dark, psychological tales of murder and intrigue thrilled and shocked readers worldwide, died Saturday. She was 74.
2 She died at the Carita hospital in the southern Swiss town of Locarno, according to a hospital official. No cause of death was given.
3 Her haunting, harrowing tales were published in 20 languages, and were especially popular in Europe. Many of her principal characters, even if they had killed someone, escaped detection.
4 'I rather like criminals and find them extremely interesting, unless they are monotonously and stupidly brutal,' she once said.
5 Highsmith's first novel, 'Strangers on a Train,' appeared in 1950, after being rejected by six publishers. Alfred Hitchcock made it into a movie the following year and it became a classic of suspense fiction
6 She wrote some 20 novels and seven short-story collections. She was best known for the character of Tom Ripley, a charming psychopath who killed some nine people in the five novels in which he was hero.
7 In the first of the series, 'The Talented Mr. Ripley,' a young American traveling in Europe murdered a young man and took on his identity. Having become rich on the dead man's inheritance, Ripley gained access to European high society. Although he subsequently resumed his true identity, he escaped justice.
8 The book received the prestigious Mystery Writers of America scroll in 1957. Highsmith said of all her characters, Ripley was her favorite.
9 Her last book, Ripley Under Water, was published in 1991.
10 Highsmith herself frequently used to protest that 'I'm not a mystery writer.'
11 'Solving a murder case leaves me completely indifferent. Is there anything more artificial and boring than justice?' she said.
12 'I invent stories, it is not my aim to morally rearm the reader, I want to entertain,' she said.
13 One of her favorite plot devices was based on torturous relations between two very different men, although she used to vary her themes considerably.
14 For instance, in 1952, she wrote, under a pseudonym, 'The Price of Salt,' a story of lesbian love. In her 1975 short stories 'The Animal-Lovers Book of Beastly Murder,' the people were killed by animals.
15 'Edith's Diary,' in 1977, seemed at first sight to be a tale of routine housework like tidying up, and making tea and toast. Under this lurked the theme of a wife driven to insanity by her demanding husband and son and retreating into the fantasy world of her diary.
16 Highsmith's novels won wide critical acclaim. Graham Greene once described her as 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.'
17 The London Times Literary Supplement in 1975 said she was 'the crime writer who comes closest to giving crime writing a good name.'
18 Highsmith's life was greatly influenced by an unhappy childhood. Her parents, who were of British and German ancestry, divorced shortly after she was born in Fort Worth, Texas.
19 Her mother subsequently married Stanley Highsmith, a commercial artist, and then took Patricia to New York when she was six years old. Highsmith described her childhood, overshadowed by rows between her mother and stepfather, as a 'little hell.'
20 She found solace in a love of books at an early age. 'I could read like a streak because my grandmother taught me when I was two,' she said.
21 She became editor of the school newspaper at Julia Richman High School in Manhattan and wrote her first short stories when she was 17.
22 She never read classic mystery writers like Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle, preferring instead pyschological masters like Leo Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoievski's 'Crime and Punishment.' She also derived inspiration from crimes she read about in newspapers.
23 While Highsmith liked to shock with her books, she lived a reclusive private life. She never married or had children.
24 She moved to Europe in 1963, and lived in Italy, England and France before settling in a quiet sunny corner of Switzerland near the town of Locarno.
25 She occasionally returned to the United States on business trips but shunned living there.
26 'By and large I think Americans are not conscious enough of the world. They conscious of the state, but they don't take an interest in the entire world which I think is necessary,' she said in a 1984 interview with The Associated Press.
27 Highsmith occasionally received visitors and granted interviews in her 100-year-old house near the Italian border. But she preferred to be on her own, with her two daily packs of strong, unfiltered cigarettes and her cats.
28 She once listed her interests as drawing, carpentering and snail-watching.
29 Despite all the praise Highsmith earned during her 40-year career, she also had her critics.
30 An anonymous reviewer in the London Times Literary Reviewer wrote in 1965: 'There are not many nastier fictional worlds than Patricia Highsmith's . worlds for sadistic voyeurs who get their kicks from seeing the poor worms hooked and squirming.'

Patricia Highsmith , an American crime writer whose dark , psychological tales of murder and intrigue thrilled and shocked readers worldwide , died Saturday . She was 74 .
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