This book, too, has been the subject of a number of film versions. In 1955 her anti-hero Tom Ripley appeared in the splendid 'The Talented Mr Ripley', a book that was awarded the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere as the best foreign mystery novel translated into French in 1957. The novel has been adapted for the screen three times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. Her first suspense novel 'Strangers on a Train' published in 1950 was an immediate success with public and critics alike. During this period of her life she lived variously in New York and Mexico. She continued to write short stories, many of them comic book stories, and regularly earned herself a weekly $55 pay-check. Shortly after graduation her short story 'The Heroine' was published in the Harper's Bazaar magazine and it was selected as one of the 22 best stories that appeared in American magazines in 1945 and it won the O Henry award for short stories in 1946.

Returning to her parents in New York, she attended public schools in New York City and later graduated from Barnard College in 1942. She lived with her grandmother, mother and later step-father (her mother divorced her natural father six months before 'Patsy' was born and married Stanley Highsmith) in Fort Worth before moving with her parents to New York in 1927 but returned to live with her grandmother for a year in 1933.

Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist who is known mainly for her psychological crime thrillers which have led to more than two dozen film adaptations over the years.

The price of salt