SOURCE: "Stranger than Fiction," in Out, June, 1995, pp. 70, 72, 150.

In the following essay, Peters provides an overview of Highsmith's career, focusing on her fascination with death and murder, her lesbianism, and critical reaction to her work.

"Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and I am sorry that is so." This quote, from Oscar Wilde's personal letters, was used by writer Patricia Highsmith in a foreword to one of her 21 extraordinary novels. It might as well have been her epitaph (she died of leukemia at age 74 in Switzerland on February 4), for the statement sums up so simply the eerie melancholy that colored her lifework.

From her first novel, Strangers on a Train (immortalized, if bowdlerized, in Hitchcock's classic film), to her last, Small g: A Summer Idyll, about a bizarre gay bar in Zurich (published in London, just days after her death), Patricia...