Editing Patricia Highsmith (section)

=== Style ===
Highsmith mostly wrote in the third-person singular from the point of view of the main character who is usually male. In several novels she alternates the point of view of two leading male characters.<ref name="Harrison1997" />{{Rp|page=96}}<ref name="Mawer2004">{{Cite book|last=Mawer |first=Noel |title=A Critical Study of the Fiction of Patricia Highsmith: from the Psychological to the Political (Studies in American Literature, Vol 65) |publisher=The Edwin Mellen Press |year=2004 |isbn=0773465081 |location=Lewiston, N.Y.}}</ref>{{Rp|pages=7–8}} In 1966, she explained that a single point of view "increased the intensity of a story" whereas a double point of view brings a "change of pace and mood."<ref name="Mawer2004" />{{Rp|pages=7–8}}

Wilson calls Highsmith's prose style crisp, compact and near transparent.<ref name="Wilson2003" />{{Rp|page=79}} Schenkar describes her narrative tone as a "low, flat compellingly psychotic murmur."<ref name="Schenkar2009" />{{Rp|pages=xiv–xv}} Wilson describes her tone as amoral, adding: "The mundane and the trivial are described in the same pitch as the horrific and the sinister and it is this unsettling juxtaposition that gives her work such power."<ref name="Wilson2003" />{{Rp|pages=5, 221–23}}

Commentators have variously described the atmosphere evoked by Highsmith's work as one of suspense, apprehension or unease. Graham Greene called her "the poet of apprehension."<ref name="Wilson2003" />{{Rp|page=7}} Peters states: "Highsmith's forte is anxiety: rather than merely turning the page to discover what happens next – in other words to be held in a state of suspense – her readers are suspended in a haze of dread, anxiety and apprehension."<ref name="Peters2011" />{{Rp|page=18}} Wilson argues that Highsmith disturbs her readers by manipulating them into identifying with unconventional psychologies: "Highsmith's world is seen through the distorted perspective of an 'abnormal' man, but the style of writing is so transparent and flat that by the end the reader aligns himself with a point of view that is clearly unbalanced and disturbed."<ref name="Peters2011" />{{Rp|page=89}}