 First edition (UK) | |
| Author | Patricia Highsmith |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Set in | United States |
| Published | Heinemann (UK) Penzler Books (US) |
Publication date | 1983 (UK); 1985 (US) |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 305 |
| ISBN | 0434335215 |
| OCLC | 716454050 |
| 813/.54 | |
| LC Class | 83152470 |
People Who Knock on the Door (1983) is a novel by Patricia Highsmith. It was the nineteenth of her 22 novels.
Highsmith drew inspiration from the revival of fundamentalist Christianity that achieved notoriety in the late 1970s in the US with the prominence of Jerry Falwell and other televangelists and the organization of its political arm, the Moral Majority. She watched US television programs in search of details for depicting preachers and advocates of religious fundamentalism. She traveled from Europe for several weeks in 1981 to visit New York City, Indianapolis, and Bloomington and she returned to Bloomington the next year as well. She appears to have modeled the novel's Chalmerstown on Bloomington, a rather small town that is home to a large university. [1]
She was unhappy that her final draft contained much more dialogue than is typical of her writing. [2] Heinemann, her usual British publisher, brought the book out in 1983 to strong reviews. Her US editor, on the other hand, did not recommend it to Harper & Row, where he had recently moved from Lippincott. Highsmith commented: "I really don't care much if my books are published in the USA or not. I've never lost or changed a publisher because of my demanding a big advance, it's that the USA publishers do not take chances, there's no loyalty–and maybe not much loyalty among readers in the USA." [3] Penzler Books, a small publishing house that specialized in crime and mysteries, published the novel in the US in 1985.
The title refers to the missionaries' standard method of evangelization, ringing doorbells to engage neighbors in conversation. In the course of the novel, a representative of the local church knocks unannounced on several occasions at the door of the Alderman or Brewster family.
The British edition carried the dedication:
To the courage of the Palestinian people and their leaders in the struggle to regain a part of their homeland. This book has nothing to do with their problem. [4]
She would have known that the Christian fundamentalist community in the US was committed to unquestioned support for Israel. Anticipating negative publicity, Penzler dropped the dedication from the US edition without Highsmith's consent, though her Swiss publisher agreed. She later complained of this and said Penzler did so because he was a Jew, though he was not. Penzler produced a special edition of the novel and several of her short stories and brought Highsmith from Switzerland to New York to publicize them. After multiple instances of very rude behavior on Highsmith's part during the publicity tour, Penzler termed her "the most unloving and unlovable person I've ever known ... a really terrible human being." [5]
Arthur Alderman is in his senior year of high school in Chalmerstown, a small city in the Midwest. He expects to attend Columbia University in New York City. His hectoring and distant father, Richard, sells insurance and retirement finance packages. Lois, his mother, keeps house and volunteers regularly at the local orphanage. Robbie, his younger brother and only sibling, recovers from a medical emergency, and this inspires a new religiosity in Richard, who insists on church attendance by the entire family. Religious literature soon fills their home. Arthur has his first sexual experience with Maggie Brewster and learns a few weeks later that she is pregnant. With the support of her family, she has an abortion, as Richard tries and fails to persuade Arthur to intervene to stop it. A visitor from the church, Eddie Howell, makes the first of several intrusive visits to pressure Arthur as well. Arthur resists, defending Maggie's right to decide for herself; he draws on his passion for science to reinforce his feelings of how inferior he feels the 'religious' people are. The confrontation further transforms his relationship with his father: "Eddie Howell was a sick prig, Arthur thought, and so was his father to be sitting there with a solemn face, concentrating on this twit–fifteen or twenty years younger than his father–as if he were God himself or some kind of divine messenger." [6]
Arthur is now persona non grata in his own family, weakly supported by his mother and visiting grandmother. For support he leans on an elderly woman neighbor, his friend Gus, and his employer for the summer at a local shoe store. He bonds with Maggie's mother. Without his father's financial support, he arranges to attend the much less expensive local university instead of Columbia. Robbie seems to adopt his father's moral principles, though he is otherwise socially odd, spending his free time fishing or hunting with a group of older men in a strange community of misfits. He becomes an increasingly dark and sullen presence; Richard appears not to notice, Lois voices some concerns which go nowhere. Arthur's relationship with Maggie's survives several months of separation while she is away at Radcliffe. When she and Arthur bolt the doors to ensure themselves some privacy in the Aldermen house, for a few hours during Christmas vacation, Robbie raises alarms and Richard orders Arthur to move out of the family home.
Richard has become increasingly involved in church activities and participates in outreach programs and counseling. He devotes exceptional amounts of time to Irene, a former prostitute who earns a meager income waitressing at a local truck stop. Irene becomes an ever more intrusive presence. Her pregnancy leads to a dramatic resolution of the Alderman family's conflicts.
The New York Times reviewer noted that the subject was "something of a departure from her usual analysis of aberrant personalities" and "surprisingly dull" and "a bit of a yawn". She complained that Highsmith focused on a "sympathetic yet unexceptional youth" ill-suited to "her brilliant insights into criminal psychology" that might better have targeted his brother and father. [7] The reviewer for The Tablet , a London-based Roman Catholic journal, wrote: "One of the annoying things about this cold story is that it forces one to take the wrong side, for Arthur and his mother are so nice in spite of their behaviour, while Richard and Robbie are so odious in their righteousness -- maybe because of it, the author seems to suggest." She praised "the atmosphere of small-town summer" but faulted the denouement: "It is some kind of solution, but not a comfortable one; Miss Highsmith can do much better than this callous if skilful story." [8]
Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short story writer widely known for her psychological thrillers, including her series of five novels featuring the character Tom Ripley.
The American Friend is a 1977 neo-noir film by Wim Wenders, adapted from the 1974 novel Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith. The film features Dennis Hopper as career criminal Tom Ripley and Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Zimmermann, a terminally ill picture framer whom Ripley coerces into becoming an assassin. The film uses an unusual "natural" language concept: Zimmermann speaks German with his family and his doctor, but English with Ripley and while visiting Paris.
Thomas Ripley is a fictional character in a series of crime novels by American novelist Patricia Highsmith, as well as several film adaptations. The character is an anti-hero: he is a career criminal, a con artist and serial killer. The five novels in which he appears—The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, and Ripley Under Water, were published between 1955 and 1991.
This Sweet Sickness (1960) is a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith, about a man who is obsessed with a woman who has rejected his advances. It is a "painful novel about obsessive imaginary love".
The Price of Salt is a 1952 romance novel by Patricia Highsmith, first published under the pseudonym "Claire Morgan". Highsmith—known as a suspense writer based on her psychological thriller Strangers on a Train—used an alias because she did not want to be tagged as "a lesbian-book writer", and because of the use of her own life references for characters and occurrences in the story. Though Highsmith had many sexual and romantic relationships with women and wrote over 22 novels and numerous short stories, The Price of Salt is her only novel about an unequivocal lesbian relationship, and its relatively happy ending was unprecedented in lesbian literature. It is also notable for being the only one of her novels with "a conventional 'happy ending'" and characters who had "more explicit sexual existences".
Otto Penzler is a German-born American editor of mystery fiction, and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City.
Deep Water is a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith, first published in 1957 by Harper & Brothers. It is Highsmith's fifth published novel, the working title originally being The Dog in the Manger. It was brought back into print in the US in 2003 by W. W. Norton & Company.
The Cry of the Owl is a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith, the eighth of her 22 novels. It was first published in the US in 1962 by Harper & Row and in the UK by Heinemann the following year. It explores, in the phrase of critic Brigid Brophy, "the psychology of the self-selected victim".
Theodora Roosevelt Keogh O'Toole Rauchfuss was an American novelist writing under her first married name, Theodora Keogh, in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Glass Cell (1964) is a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith. It was the tenth of her 22 novels. It addresses the psychological and physical impact of wrongful imprisonment. It appeared in both the UK and the US in 1964. When first published, the book jacket carried a warning that its opening scene is "almost unacceptable".
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A Game for the Living (1958) is a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith. It is the sixth of her 22 novels and the only one set in Mexico.
The Two Faces of January (1964) is a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith. Its title alludes to the two faces of the Roman god Janus, after whom the month of January was named. Biographer Andrew Wilson, in his 2003 publication Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith claims the title is 'appropriate for the janus-faced, flux-like nature of her protagonists'.
A Suspension of Mercy (1965) is a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith. It was published in the US under the title The Story-Teller later the same year by Doubleday. It was the eleventh of her 22 novels.
Edith's Diary (1977) is a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith, the seventeenth of her 22 novels. It was first published in the UK by Heinemann. One critic described it as "a relentless dissection of an unexceptional life that burns itself out from a lack of love and happiness".
Small g: a Summer Idyll (1995) is the final novel by American writer Patricia Highsmith. It was published in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury a month after her death, after first being rejected by Knopf, her usual publisher, months earlier. It was published in the United States by W.W. Norton in 2004.
The Cry of the Owl is a 2009 thriller film based on Patricia Highsmith's 1962 book of the same name. The American-British-Canadian-French-German co-product and was directed by Jamie Thraves. and stars Paddy Considine, Julia Stiles, and Karl Pruner. This is the third filming of the book after the 1987 French film adaptation by Claude Chabrol and a German TV adaptation titled Der Schrei der Eule, also dating from 1987. After Robert Forrester is caught by Jenny Thierolf, the girl he has been spying on, he becomes the victim of her manipulative advances. The disappearance of Jenny's fiancé Greg after a fight with Robert marks the beginning of a series of dangerous and ultimately fatal incidents.
Patricia Schartle Myrer (1923–2010) was an editor, literary agent and publishing executive based in New York City. She was editor-in-chief of Appleton-Century-Crofts publishing. She eventually became president of McIntosh & Otis literary agency. She married novelist Anton Myrer in 1970. Some of the authors she represented were Mary Higgins Clark, Patricia Highsmith and Eleanor Hibbert. She retired in 1984 and died in 2010.
Found in the Street (1986) is the twentieth novel by the American expatriate writer Patricia Highsmith, the nineteenth published under her own name. It was published in the UK in April 1986 and in the US in 1987.
Sarah Hilary is a UK crime novelist and former bookseller. Her debut, Someone Else's Skin, won the 2015 Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. Hilary was born in Cheshire before moving to the South East to study for a First Class Honours Degree in the History of Ideas. She won the Fish Criminally Short Histories Prize in 2008 for her story, Fall River, August 1892. In 2012, she was awarded the Cheshire Prize for Literature.