Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
“The novel has many virtues, including a stunning sense of place and a fascinating cast of characters.” —Pauline Mayer, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“Illuminating”and always compelling,” wrote the New York Times when Those Who Walk Away was originally published in 1967. Yet again, as the New Yorker reported in 1988, “Highsmith keeps moving, darting in and out of our field of vision, making afterimages that will tremble … but stay … in our minds.”
The honeymoon is over, as they say, the bride dead by her own hand. Ray Garrett, the grieving husband, convinces the police in Rome of his innocence, but not his thuggish father-in-law, an American painter named Ed Coleman, who shoots him at point-blank range and leaves him for dead. Ray survives, however, and follows Coleman to Venice, where the two fall into an eerie game of cat-and-mouse”Coleman obsessed with vengeance and Ray equally insistent on clearing his conscience, though each is at once the hunter and the hunted in a duel composed of tension, hiding, and guessing, and at times punctuated by violence that, even as each manages to walk away, draws them nearer to death.
Ray and Coleman, according to Julian Symons, “are among the most memorable products of Highsmith’s powerful imagination.”
“Absorbing . . . illuminating–and always compelling.” —Anthony Boucher, New York Times Book Review
“[Ray and Coleman] are among the most memorable products of Highsmith’s powerful imagination . . . The deadly games of pursuit . . . are as subtle and interesting as anything being done in the novel today.” —Julian Symons, Times Literary Supplement
“The novel has many virtues, including a stunning sense of place and a fascinating cast of characters.” —Pauline Mayer, Cleveland Plain Dealer
An Independent Literary Publisher Since 1917
