A Dog’s Ransom by Patricia Highsmith

(pb; 1972)

From the back cover

“. . . a high-minded criminal hits a Manhattan couple where it hurts the most when he kidnaps their beloved black miniature poodle, Lisa, from Riverside Park. Ed Reynolds, a forty-two-year-old editor at a prestigious publishing house, returns home one night to find a note: ‘Dear Sir. I have your dog Lisa. She is well and happy. . . I gather she is important to you? We’ll se.’ and so the nightmare begins for the Reynolds couple in this harrowing portrait of mid-century urban life shattered by a single bizarre event.”

Review

Ransom is an okay read. Highsmith, as usual, takes a standard thriller setup and restructures, shakes it up, with her analytical, incisive genre-mixing tone and style.

The main villain, Kenneth Rowajinski, reminds me a lot of the emotional/criminal journeys of other Highsmith characters─namely, Walter Stackhouse from her 1954 novel The Blunderer as well as young Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). Her distinctive setup reminds me of her excellent 1983 novel People Who Knock on the Door, with its long, steady build into murder and further tragedy, as well as its effective takedown of middle-class smugness and over-reliance on material comfort.

That said, Ransom is not as good as People, at least for this reader. I could not relate to most of the characters, whose actions and outlooks were apathetic, callous, needy, languid (in that Highsmithian way) and overtly self-destructive. I “get” that we are viewing things through her lens, but none of these characters have redeeming qualities. It’s all various shades of darkness, ignorance and other negative elements─in a phrase, a hundred-percent nihilistic.

It does not help that Highsmith has one of her less odious characters, Clarence Pope Duhamell, think: “A pity that New York had been overrun by blacks and Puerto Ricans instead of by some race that might have improved things.” This is not the only part with racist rumblings. While she is reflecting the spirit of the age (and most ages), it felt unnecessarily ugly.

Ransom is worth reading, if you don’t mind Highsmith’s into-a-void misanthropy and unlikeable characters. The style and writing are fine, for the most part, but its darkness is a bit much, even for Highsmith.