The Blunderer – Patricia Highsmith (1954)

Towards the end of last year, I became aware that Pamela Highsmith’s centenary was approaching. While there may not be any official reading events that I could find – I decided 2021 would be the year for me to get to know her work a little better.

The Blunderer is the fourth Highsmith novel I have read to date – and it is certainly an excellent example of all the things she does so well. Not only does she wheedle her way into her characters heads, but she gets into the reader’s too – she manipulates the way we see her characters as we find ourselves hating the wrong guy. Few writers do psychological tension this well – she knows exactly how people think and act – what errors they might make when a bit of pressure is applied.

Walter Stackhouse is young, a successful lawyer, married to Clara who herself is very successful in the field of real estate. At least on the surface, he seems to have it all. However, the novel opens with another couple, and a seemingly perfect murder.

A man – who we later learn is a bookseller – named Melchior Kimmel follows his wife’s bus from Newark to Albany, planning to intercept her at the rest stop. He established his alibi by buying a cinema ticket – running into someone he knew in the auditorium, then slipping out a side door. He follows his wife’s bus out of town, and when the bus stops, he takes her to one side as if to talk confidentially, they wander away from the bus and he kills her quickly, dumping her body close to the side of the road.

Walter Stackhouse reads about the crime in the newspaper – wonders idly about the husband – immediately seeing how he could in fact have done it. Walter keeps the newspaper article – thinking it might provide useful inspiration for one of the essays he sometimes writes for his own amusement.

“Walter smiled. He saw the item he had torn out about the woman murdered at the bus stop. The words did not come, but he saw the picture of her. She lay in some woods, and there was a bloody gash down her cheek from her eye to the corner of her lip. She was not pretty, but she had a pleasant face, black wavy hair, a strong simple body and a trusting mouth that would have opened in horror at the first threat from her assaulter. A woman like that wouldn’t have gone with a stranger any distance on a road.”

Again, and again Walter’s mind returns to Melchior Kimmel and what he believes this other man may have done – little knowing that this fascination with the case might ultimately change his own life forever.

Walter’s relationship with his wife Clara has run into difficulties – we quickly see what a difficult woman she is to live with – exacting and emotional even threatening suicide to get her own way. Clara has already driven most of Walter’s friends away with her unreasonable behaviour – and has completely barred one friend from entry into their home. Walter is still attracted to Clara, but she is becoming ever harder to live with. With that newspaper article in the back of his mind, he can’t help but fantasise about how he could kill Clara. Even when Clara’s unreasonable and unfounded jealousy finally drives him to seek the company of another woman – Walter is only ever really contemplating divorcing her and plans a trip to Reno to do it quickly. Ellie is a kind, attractive young woman, new to the area, she has become aware of Walter’s situation, and sympathises with his unhappiness. An affair seems almost inevitable.   

However, when Clara’s body is found at the bottom of a cliff – everything changes for Walter. Clara was supposed to be visiting her mother – she caught a bus – but after the bus pulls in at a roadside rest stop she doesn’t return to her seat. Her body is found close to where she was last seen. Soon the police are on Walter’s doorstep – and no matter how innocent he is of Clara’s death he seems set on making mistake after mistake – and worse still knowing he has made mistakes he lies about them.

Walter’s position is looking more and more precarious as the police start looking into his behaviour in relation to that earlier killing – for which the husband was always suspected but who police were unable to charge. The police start to wonder whether Walter got the idea for Clara’s murder from that other murder. One policeman in particular is obsessed with both cases – Lieutenant Lawrence Corby – whose methods are often cruel and even violent – he starts playing one man off against the other in the hopes of catching them both. Highsmith presents Corby as by far the most sinister of the three men.

“Corby was looking at him shrewdly, though some of the surprise was still left in his face, watching him as if he were only waiting, only had to wait, for Walter to say something that would clinch his guilt. Corby smiled a little. ‘I’d like to know just what did go through your mind when you tore that piece out.’”

It is absolutely typical that Highsmith plays with her reader’s sympathies here – we despise and fear Corby and even find ourselves having some sympathy with Melchior Kimmel who we know right from the start is actually a murderer.

Walter is poised to lose everything, the few friends Clara had not scared off, his new girlfriend his job and his reputation – as one by one people start to look at him differently, and Corby seems intent on piling on the pressure.

The Blunderer is a wonderful vintage psychological thriller – Highsmith builds the tension just perfectly, playing into all out fears of being accused of something we haven’t done.