The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith
(W.W. Norton & Company) $27.95

I've heard someone say (I can't, for the life of me, remember who) that in the new terrorism-ridden world, people who read are gravitating toward murder mysteries. Why? Because murder mysteries pry the lid off the world to reveal the chaos inside--and then, at the end, safely pop that lid back on. It's a way of exerting control over the uncontrollable, or at least a temporary fix for the feeling that the world is careening away.

This may or may not explain the way that Patricia Highsmith's excellent novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was misinterpreted by the director who turned it into a feature film. Highsmith, who died in 1995, was not one to turn evil into a manageable commodity; in her world, to think it possible to surmount evil was to fatally misunderstand it. Ripley the novel was about naked ambition and inherent badness; Ripley the film tidied these motives into masked homosexual longing.

All you need to do to understand Highsmith is to pick up her Selected Stories and read any three stories together. They're cold, pitiless, stony, aloof. Author graciousness is not extended, either to reader or characters. Warmth is optional, a luxury.

In other words, they are bracing and awakening, like a cold plunge. There is no phony redemption, no moralizing, no Oprah-style identification with characters. Highsmith reserves her greatest scorn for her own sex. A strange collection called Little Tales of Misogyny (included in its entirety) is a set of 17 stories of hapless female archetypes--including "The Mobile Bed-Object," whose lover finds it easier to kill than to get rid of. No one misses her, and her "absence was never taken seriously by anyone."

To read Highsmith's work, you have to surrender the notion that stories carry messages, that they tell us how to live and behave; hers are simply cautionary tales where the fact of being human cuts no ice. In Graham Greene's much-quoted introduction, he writes, "She... has created a world of her own--a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.... This is a world without moral endings." It may, in the end, be a more useful working definition of evil than the kind that submits to order. EMILY HALL