“Murder is always on her mind and she always confuses it with love…”. When in the 60s the American book critics give their appreciation for the work of the American Patricia Highsmith, she, a 38-year-old successful writer, plows the Greek landscapes and prepares her next book against the background of the columns of the Acropolis and the bullrings of Knossos.

Its creator Talented Mr. Ripley (introduced him to the bibliophile public in 1955), still scandalizes the American continent with its charming psychopathic hero, who murders people and “dresses” their lives with impressive success.

Highsmith takes her dark hero across the Mediterranean on an adventurous journey of imitating foreign characters and customs. It reaches him in southern Italy and somewhere there he lets him express his crazy desire to visit Greece. Mr. Ripley doesn’t make it.

Mrs. Highsmith, however, already imagines herself perambulating the rock of the Acropolis. Her dream will come true in the spring of 1959. In a few years (1964) from that trip, her new book titled “The Two Faces of January” will be published with a plot that develops in Greek landscapes.

The title refers to the two sides of Janus. “The beautiful and the ugly of a character unfold more easily in beautiful landscapes… Beauty is the good face of Janus. But the hatred that she can inspire at the same time reveals the evil” she will try to explain, when asked.

From the first moment she has been characterized as a detective fiction writer, but her obsessions are not the murders. They are her killer characters. Their profane acts serve nothing but as a starting point for internal excavations into unexplored passions. The murders are just a backdrop to the action.

Because whether her murders are “intentional” or “negligent”, she tortures her perpetrators until the last moment. He does not subject them to the struggle of being chased by the law, but to their own, inner search. In the confrontation with their souls, in their self-criticism, in their guilt, in their complexes. “It is impossible for me to live from day to day without judging myself” she herself will once confess, when asked why she puts her heroes through such suffering…

When the Iranian-British Hossein Amini decides to adapt “The Two Faces of January” for the cinema, the people of the area hold a small basket… “Let’s at least enjoy Greece. You don’t untie Highsmith’s knots easily” they will say. Despite the luxury of the image, which the cinema has, the book is an affair of the very lowest level. The one that the camera can’t easily pierce.

In this book, Highsmith will “kill” the first victim in a room on the 5th floor of the “Kings Palace”, on the corner of Panepistimo and Kriezotou (“not a luxury hotel, but first class” she describes it). In fact, the first choice for the pair of heroes of the book, who arrive in Greece is “Great Britain”, but they regret it. They don’t want to give a target. That’s how they choose the neighborhood (“Great Brittany’s white facade exuded an air of solemnity, but also of sterilization, in contrast to the lower and dirtier buildings around it in Syntagma Square. There was some government building on the right, with the Greek flag flying and two soldiers in skirts and white stockings standing guard”…).

Highsmith’s second victim in Greece will die against the backdrop of the famous bull-eating fresco in the courtyard of the Stone Stomium, in the palace of Knossos. The mural, which travels around the world’s university institutions teaching Minoan culture, alternates in flash rhythm with the body of the second victim…

They will be manslaughter, but the perpetrator, who will be hunted across the country first by himself and then by the representatives of the law, already has a checkered past. “He will not paint Greece with dirty blood. She loves Greece” will be mentioned in a related review after the publication of her book with the background of Greek landscapes (blood gets dirty when you provoke it…). For the sake of the place, which Highsmith herself has turned into a desirable fantasy, the critic overplays the author’s admiration for Greece, “rounding up”, almost justifying, the taking of life (“how could one commit premeditated murder in a such a landscape?” asks the critic, when “a poet finds his inspiration in Greece…” comments the heroine of the book).

But Highsmith’s life, which will be revealed widely after her death, will belie American criticism. In fact, murder (whether intentional or not) is the author’s favorite tool for shamelessly turning her typically lonely, complex, downtrodden gay heroes inside out. Behind every psychotic situation hides herself and probably her homosexuality, which never managed to fly in the face of the American conservative society of her time, even when she wrote under the pseudonym Claire Morgan “The price of Salt”, a story that refers to the love affair of two seemingly mismatched women. The book received extremely mixed reviews, either laudatory or scornful. However, when she was asked about the book – before it was revealed that she was behind its writing – she called it “stinky”…

She is as tough as she is fragile, as misanthropic as she is a human mystery, as fanciful as she is cynically true. Highsmith, through her stories, explores the rough paths drawn by the troubled relationship with her mother.

She didn’t experience paternal care anyway (her parents divorced a few days before she was born) and very early on she learned that the woman who gave birth to her was struggling to get rid of her before giving birth to her.

She grew up in an environment that made her feel alien and unwanted, with a stepfather who bequeathed her his surname, but who never liked her. Even the coexistence with her grandmother, from whom she sought affection, became a piece in the puzzle of her problematic character.

Her mother’s mother, a lover of letters and books, taught her granddaughter to read and write very early and, as a playground, offered Patricia her rich library. But instead of fairy tales and light novels, she preferred to study Freud’s writings… Before she was eight years old, she was playing with her fingers the psychiatric interpretations of pyromania and schizophrenia!

Her heroes are small-scale criminals, thieves, swindlers, murderers… “Through their quiet delinquency, Patricia Highsmith, in the era of the middle of the 20th century, will add to the literature a new horror: the chilling psychological thriller , where stalking is everywhere, identities, genders, genres are undermined, guilt plagues even the innocent, and good intentions are corrupted with stunning naturalness. Greece – and no Greece – is the pool of its own Siloam” M. Talbot will write in the “New Yorker”.

It is not the Greek landscape, which she dreams of and finally knows, her refuge. Either way, her position will always be that “life is a suffocating trap from which even the most accomplished escapists cannot find an elegant exit.”

Her eccentricity is impressive and unpretentious. He doesn’t seem interested in anything. Her only weaknesses are cats and snails (during her travel wanderings in Greece “she will feed half the population of stray cats” her companion and partner at the time, J. Parker, will confess years later). The garden of her home in England is a snail’s delight. Once he will be invited to an English cocktail party, he will appear with a huge paper bag, containing a lettuce and not 20 snails… “I brought them to keep me company” he will say to the hostess, leaving her speechless.

Patricia Highsmith will live a life immersed in passions and alcohol. And despite her misanthropy, she will inspire and be inspired by strong loves only with her own kind, but she will never be able to interpret the word “love”. Until her last breath, at the age of 74, she will struggle to accept the lack of maternal care that left the darkest elements in her character.

In a few days (February 4) it will be 29 years since her death, at her home in Switzerland. She bequeathed her entire fortune (about $3 million) to the Yaddo Artists and Writers Club (upstate NY), which Truman Capote had once told her about. “Come to the gay women’s sessions. They will help you accept yourself” he had told her, only to receive as an answer… “Sounds fun… And how do you know? I might even seduce some of them…”