SOURCE: A review of The Black House, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 13, 1988, p. 13.

Below, Champlin offers a positive review of The Black House.

The Black House is a collection of stories by Patricia Highsmith, the Texas-born author long a resident in Europe. Like Ruth Rendell, she keeps a very, very cold eye on the world. Her protagonists are apt to be as amoral as other writers' villains.

She is at her most characteristically cynical in "Not One of Us" in which a circle of his friends conspire in the most subtle ways to drive a decent but boring fellow named Quasthoff to suicide.

In the title story, murder is done by some local chaps simply to preserve the myths they have created for themselves about a deserted house in an Upstate New York village.

In "Old Folks at Home," a man and his wife kindly decide...