This massive tome reprints five of the seven complete collections of short stories by Highsmith (1921–95), together with a brief introduction by Graham Greene excerpted from a sixth. Little Tales of Misogyny (1974) identifies and coldly condemns such types as “The Coquette” and “The Breeder”; The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder (1975) presents animals turning on their human companions; and the remaining volumes—Slowly, Slowly in the Wind (1979), The Black House (1981), and Mermaids on the Golf Course (1985) show the pioneering novelist of psychological suspense in equally remorseless form, anatomizing the kinds of human frailty that can as easily erupt in murder as in murderous resentment.
