SOURCE: "A Portrait of the Artist: The Novels of Patricia Highsmith," in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring/Summer, 1984, pp. 115-30.

Hubly is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, she discusses how Highsmith's portrayal of artists in her novels advances such themes as identity, homosexuality, and the real versus the imagined. The critic focuses on the character Sydney Bartleby, the protagonist of A Suspension of Mercy, and Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Patricia Highsmith's artists, those characters who create works of art and often themselves in the process, form, even when compared to some of her other protagonists, a unique group of characters. There is Sydney Bartleby, the writer-hero of A Suspension of Mercy, who in order to stimulate his imagination, plans the imaginary murder of his wife, an endeavor which he then proceeds to act out as though it were...