I first read Patricia Highsmith’s novels in the autumn of 1994. I was 20 and living in a room in her house in Tegna, Switzerland, that was plastered with bookshelves of her first editions.
Pat was 73 and knew she was about to die. She had weeks to live and had spent so much time writing about how to get away with murder. I fantasised she might try to kill me.
The story of how I ended up in that house begins a few months earlier in Zurich, at the house of Anna and Daniel Keel, a couple I’d grown friendly with. Anna was a brilliant painter for whom I had been modelling since I was 17. Anna’s husband, Daniel – or Dani, as we called him – was the founder and owner of Diogenes Verlag, a publishing house.
Dani mentioned he was looking for an English speaker with a European driving licence to take care of one of his authors in Ticino, Switzerland. The divorced man who had been doing the job had called to say he was not going to do it any more; he had decided to become a monk.
Without thinking it through, I volunteered. As Dani knew, I was about to go back to Spain to start college, so he shook his head. But I insisted, explaining that all I needed to do was go to class for a month to meet the professors and collect my books. After I had done that, I could help until my exams in December.
