SOURCE: "Death for Elsie," in London Review of Books, Vol. 8, No. 14, August 7, 1986, p. 21.

In the following excerpt, Ricks provides a positive review of Found in the Street, focusing on Highsmith's depiction of crime and her portrayal of the protagonist, Elsie Tyler.

Patricia Highsmith has been praised by Graham Greene in the good old way as 'a writer who has created a world of her own'. She can be even better than that—when she takes a world and makes it not only her own but ours. She lurks in the murk where you have to peer to check if this is an—or the—underworld. In her seething city-settings, paranoia may be the saving of you, and yet paranoia does have, too, a hideously masochistic alluring power. She is the poet of these death-bearing pheromones of fear.

Found in the Street is her exact territory; she patrols these...