Melinda Van Allen is beautiful, rebellious, tempestuous and sexy. And unfortunately for wealthy socialite Vic Van Allen, she is his wife. An incorrigible flirt, Melinda spares no opportunity to flaunt her many lovers to her husband. In response, Vic doesn't miss an opportunity to let them know that he's the jealous type. When Malcolm McCrae, one of Melinda's exes, is murdered in the city, Vic doesn't hesitate to suggest to her latest paramour that he might have been responsible. But as rumours about Vic's nasty streak begin to spread amongst their friends, fiction and reality begin to converge. And it's only a matter of time before Vic really does have blood on his hands.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
'Highsmith writes about men like a spider writing about flies' Observer 'An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there's nothing quite like it' Boston Globe 'The outstanding merit of Deep Water is the dexterity with which it develops the psychopath's portrait from the first faint agreeable outline to the full dark horrific colours of schizophrenia. If you read crime stories at all, or perhaps especially if you don't, you should read Deep Water' Sunday Times
About the Author
Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921. Her first novel, Strangers On A Train, was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955, was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll by the Mystery Writers of America and introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, who was to appear in many of her later crime novels. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously just over a month later.
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More About the Author
Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was the author of more than twenty novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The pages turn very fast indeed....,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Deep Water (Paperback)
Thirty-six-year-old Victor Van Allen is being cuckolded, quite blatantly. For a number of years his wife Melinda has paraded a succession of lovers around their small town of Little Wesley, Massachusetts, dragging the men along to the Van Allens' dinner engagements with friends, dancing with them provocatively, entertaining them in night-long debauches in the Van Allens' home. Victor's friends shake their heads or offer him extra desserts at parties--pity food--and they marvel at his reaction to the insult: Victor is a paragon of patience. He allows Melinda her lovers, only wishing that she attracted a higher quality paramour. Still, Victor is not as unconcerned about Melinda's behavior as he appears. He regularly forces himself to stay awake and chaperone his wife's "dates" in their living room rather than please the couple by retiring to his separate bedroom. And, near the beginning of the novel, Victor announces to his wife's most recent flame that he once killed a lover of hers, a certain Malcolm McRae. Victor is lying, but McRae *had* been pummeled to death in his New York apartment, and his murderer had not been identified.
This being a Patricia Highsmith novel, it cannot be a good thing for our put-upon protagonist to confess to a murder he did not commit, and the reader begins at once to wonder how this misstep of Victor's will lead to his undoing. But it is unlikely that readers will correctly anticipate precisely how Victor's story plays itself out. Patricia Highsmith--the author of, among many other novels, Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mister Ripley--is a master of suspense. Deep Water shares with her other books a certain remarkable slowness. Highsmith's characters unhurriedly attend to the minutiae of their lives. They entertain friends and admire artwork and do the gardening, they take drives and prepare supper. Very often it seems that nothing is happening in one of her books, and yet as the pages turn the reader becomes more and more tense, wondering when precisely the axe will fall--for it certainly will fall. By the end of Deep Water the pages turn very fast indeed. [Deep Water also shares with some of Highsmith's other novels (Found in the Street) a bizarre vision of parenthood. The Van Allens have a highly disposable daughter, perhaps eight years old, who spends her days in other people's homes, or playing contentedly by herself in her own room. She is sometimes left alone in the house. She is abandoned at the movies when her mother forgets to pick her up. Meanwhile the Van Allens' social calendar is chock full of late-night dinner parties and those uncomfortable threesomes in the living room. Part of this abuse of the daughter has to do with the storyline: Melinda is intended to be a very poor mother. But Victor, the "good" parent, leaves the house for those parties just as often as his wife does.] Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
At last . . .,
By "vortex87" (Picnic Point, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Deep Water (Paperback)
I'm happy that this -- one of Patricia Highsmith's finest novels -- is back in print, because it deserves to be read.The set-up is that Vic and Melinda are unhappily married, but rather than divorce, since they have a daughter, he lets her go off and have affairs (this seems quite an interesting concept to have proposed in 1957, when this book came out) -- and you'd think that surely, a little jealousy might come in on his part, right? Right. . . . And from here, it goes off in some interesting directions. I really didn't expect the ending. And now that it's finally available, go ahead and get it! You're missing a great novel otherwise.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Typical Highsmith,
By K. Dain Ruprecht (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Deep Water (Paperback)
This book, written in the late 1950's, is about an intelligent, sensitive, and wealthy society man who is married to a nasty stupid alcoholic sl-t who OPENLY cheats on him with a succession of random men. He puts up with it for a long time and then he kills one of her lovers. He "gets away with it" for a while... It's a typical Highsmith theme. But there are some interesting undercurrents. The husband is reluctant to divorce his wife, and yet he admits to himself that he has no desire whatsoever to sleep with her -- or any other woman, for that matter. The implication is that he is gay. This is another typical Highsmith theme. The strangest thing is not her penchant for stories about ordinary people who commit atrocious crimes on a whim -- it's her PACING. Personally, I find it mesmerizing. She just "normalizes" the hell out of everything by taking her protagonist through his day detail by detail -- what he wears, what he cooks for dinner, etc. Then he commits murder, disposes of the body -- and goes back home and makes dessert. She almost never makes any personal judgements about her characters, although her protagonists tend to be highly intelligent and culturally refined men. Their killings tend to appear "justified" in that the victims are stupid and/or smarmy. A lifelong lesbian, HIghsmith can be really unsympathetic to her female characters, especially if they have big behinds. (her male protagonists frequently express disgust with pear-shaped women). Her world view is pretty skewed, messed up even. I mean, she was a MISOGYNIST LESBIAN, for God's sake. But it's so refreshing, especially compared to all the kinetic, wordy, phony, ultra-PC, show-offy new fiction out there today. This is not really one of Highsmith's BEST (that would be, IMO, "Edith's Diary", "This Sweet Sickness", "A Tremor of Forgery" or "The Price of Salt") but it is well worth reading if you love her style as much as I do.
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