The Tremor of Forgery - Softcover

Patricia Highsmith

3.75

2,358 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747575010 ISBN 13: 9780747575016

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2006

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Under the hot desert sun nothing is quite as it seems. Howard Ingham, an American writer, is sent to Tunisia to gather material for a movie, a love story too sordid to be set in America. But his director fails to arrive as scheduled and the erratic mails bring news of infidelities and suicide. Ingham—for reasons obscure even to himself—decides to stay on and work instead on a novel. Gradually, however, a series of peculiar events—a hushed-up murder, a vanished corpse, and secret broadcasts to the Soviet Union—lures him inexorably into the deep, ambivalent shadows of this Arab town; into deceit and away from conventional morality. And when Ingham finds an accomplice to murder, or perhaps something more, what is in question is not justice or truth, but the state of his oddly quiet conscience.

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About the Author:

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and moved to New York when she was six, where she attended the Julia Richman High School and Barnard College. In her senior year she edited the college magazine, having decided at the age of sixteen to become a writer. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was made into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955, introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, and was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1999 by Anthony Minghella. Graham Greene called Patricia Highsmith 'the poet of apprehension', saying that she 'created a world of her own - a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger' and The Times named her no.1 in their list of the greatest ever crime writers. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously, the same year.

Review:

"Her best novel." The New Yorker

"Larger, funnier, and more thematically ambitious than any of Highsmith’s other novels." Francine Prose

Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear. Highsmith's finest novel to my mind is The Tremor of Forgery, and if I were asked what it is about I would reply, 'apprehension.'” Graham Greene

"Highsmith has produced work as serious in its implications and as subtle in its approach as anything being done in the novel today." Julian Symons

"Whereas we read Stephen King or Ruth Rendell to relish the thrills that come from carefully controlled verbal terror, Highsmith is not to be taken so lightly. She conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil--personal, psychological, and political." Boston Phoenix

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