★★★½☆ Well written psychological thriller with a twist.

​Bille Brown Studio, South Brisbane
May 26, 2016 

Patricia Highsmith was arguably one of the most intriguing and enigmatic writers of the later 20th century. She wrote 22 novels, principally psychological thrillers, and is credited with creating some of the more famous suspense novels of modern literature. Her novel Strangers on a Train was famously adapted by Alfred Hitchcock while she is responsible for the Ripley series, creating a horrific character who is both violent and morally ambiguous.

Joanna Murray-Smith’s latest work, Switzerland, is focused on the last days of the life of this highly-charged and darkly morbid writer as she faces what might be an uneventful death.  Patricia Highsmith eschewed the life of her homeland, reviling the ‘dead white American male’ literary establishment who failed to recognise her greatness. In contrast, Europeans did celebrate her, believing she was more than just another “high class detective novelist,” as Norman Mailer dismissingly described her. So she upped and moved to the neutral territory of Switzerland and lived out her later life there as a recluse, dying alone in 1995.

Murray-Smith takes as her premise a fictional situation where Highsmith (Andrea Moor) is visited by Edward...