—Julian Symons, New York Times Book Review
“Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic . . . has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”
—Robert Towers, New York Review of Books
“Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable.”
—Washington Post Book World
“A writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger . . . Patricia Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”
—Graham Greene
“An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there’s nothing quite like it.”
—Boston Globe
“[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“Highsmith’s novels skew your sense of literary justice, tilt your internal scales of right and wrong. The ethical order of things in the real world seems less stable [as she] deftly warps the moral sense of her readers.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Highsmith . . . conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil—personal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Highsmith’s writing is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.”
—Boston Phoenix
“No one has created psychological suspense more densely and deliciously satisfying.”
—Vogue
“Highsmith’s writing is wicked . . . it puts a spell on you, after which you feel altered, even tainted. . . . A great American writer is back to stay.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“[Highsmith] is no more a practitioner of the murder mystery genre . . . than are Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Camus.”
—Joan Smith, Los Angeles Times
“Highsmith’s gift as a suspense novelist is to show how this secret desire can bridge the normal and abnormal. . . . She seduces us with whisky-smooth surfaces only to lead us blindly into darker terrain.”
—Commercial Appeal
“Though Highsmith would no doubt disclaim any kinship with Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh, the best of [her work] is in the same tradition. . . . It is Highsmith’s dark and sometimes savage humor, and the intelligence that informs her precise and hard-edged prose, which puts one in mind of those authors.”
—Newsday
Copyright © 1964 by Patricia Highsmith
Copyright renewed 1992 by Patricia Highsmith
Copyright © 1993 by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich
First published as a Norton paperback 2004
First published in the United States of America 1964
Published in Great Britain by Heinemann 1965
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this
book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Production manager: Amanda Morrison
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Highsmith, Patricia, 1921–
The glass cell / Patricia Highsmith.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-393-32567-6 (pbk.)
1. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 2. Judicial error—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.I366G58 2004
813’.54—dc22 2004004565
eISBN: 978-0-393-34568-1
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The Glass Cell Page 26