Inside the life of the 'unlovable and unloving' Patricia Highsmith: Author of The Talented Mr Ripley was dubbed cruel and 'relentlessly ugly', hated men and said the Holocaust 'only did half the job'... as new Netflix adaptation is released

In The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith brought to life one of the most enduring antiheroes readers will come across.

As he affords himself a life of luxury by murdering and conning his way around Europe, readers hope that the chameleon character Tom Ripley will come a cropper.

Now, 69 years after the character appeared in print - before he was later brilliantly portrayed by Matt Damon on screen in 1999 - the amoral killer has returned with Andrew Scott in the titular role in Netflix's new series, Ripley.

Ripley's creator was a complex character, to put it mildly. 

A self-described 'Jew hater', she once declared that the Holocaust - in which six million Jews were murdered - should be called 'the semicaust' because it only did half the job.

She also claimed that if African men 'don't have sexual intercourse a certain amount of times a month, it doesn't matter with whom, they become ill'.  

Patricia Highsmith was a brilliant novelist but also cruel to her lovers and was a self-described 'Jew Hater'. Above: Highsmith in 1993

In The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith brought to life one of the most enduring antiheroes readers will come across. Above: Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1999 film of the same name

Highsmith, the great queen of the psychological thriller who was described by her publisher as 'relentlessly ugly', also described murder as 'a kind of making love'. 

She carried 30 snails around in her handbag and would tip them out at dinner parties before watching them as they slithered across her host's table cloth. 

Highsmith was born Mary Patricia Plangman, in Fort Worth, Texas, on January 19, 1921, 10 days after her parents had divorced.

Her mother went on to tell her that she drunk turpentine while she was carrying her in the hope of scuppering the pregnancy.

In 1927, Patricia was whisked away to New York to live with her mother and stepfather, Stanley Highsmith.

The experience of the Big Apple proved to be short lived, for she was sent back to Texas to live with her grandfather when she was 12.  

She despised her mother for the rest of her life as a result and even snubbed her funeral.

Highsmith would tell a friend in later life: 'I repeat the pattern, of course, of my mother's semi-rejection of me. I never got over it. Thus I seek out women who will hurt me in a similar manner.'

By the time she was a student at Barnard College in 1940s New York, Highsmith's diaries show that she had become an individual of immense highs and lows in both her work and personal life.

The young writer was not afraid to boast about her ability. '[I] do suspense well,' she wrote in 1942. 'The morbid, the cruel, the abnormal fascinates me.'

She said at one point that, if given the choice of saving a starving baby or a kitten, she would rescue the kitten.

The amoral killer has returned with Andrew Scott in the titular role in Netflix's new series, Ripley 

She carried 30 snails around in her handbag and would tip them out at dinner parties before watching them as they slithered across her host's table cloth. Above: The author aged 21 in 1942

The star-studded cast also includes Dakota Fanning who portrays Marge Sherwood and Johnny Flynn as Dickie 

A self-described 'Jew hater', she once declared that the Holocaust - in which six million Jews were murdered - should be called 'the semicaust' because it only did half the job 

Highsmith, the great queen of the psychological thriller who was described by her publisher as 'relentlessly ugly', also described murder as 'a kind of making love' 

This was because most people were 'morons' and so babies should be killed off at birth.   

Highsmith, who began each day with a breakfast of gin and orange and once got so drunk at a dinner party that she slumped into the candles and set her hair on fire, was also known for her lust for other women. 

Highsmith was also known for her lust for other women.  

One diary entry reads: 'Three nights, three people! She did me at least four times. 

'Sex to me should be a religion, I have no other. Sexual love is the only emotion which has ever really touched me. Hatred, jealousy, never - except devotion to myself.'

The roll-call of her numerous female lovers was the stuff of scandal in her day. There was Buffie, Rosalind, Helen, Virginia, Joan, Ellen, Doris, Daisy, to name a few.

She was cruel to many of them. When she broke up with Ellen Hill in 1953, Highsmith walked out after a row, leaving her lover to swill down martinis laced with barbiturates. Hill barely survived.

The author is known to have threatened at least one of her lovers with a knife. 

Another lover, Marijane Meaker, later recalled: 'Pat always used her books to portray and murder the woman she had last been out with. 

'After we broke up, she murdered me very brutally, in The Cry Of The Owl, with a knife, several times.'

One biographer wrote: 'Pat thought about love the way she thought about murder — as an emotional urgency between two people, one of who dies in the act.'

Highsmith did also try to pursue with relationships with the opposite sex and at one point got close to marrying a man.

She even underwent six months of psychotherapy in the hope of overcoming her aversion.  

Marc, her would-be fiancé, told her that she was sexually 'rootless and infantile' and that she disgusted him.

But Highsmith was equally disgusted by men. She said she preferred 'putting my own hands up my skirt', a reference to the boys she encountered in her early life.

One male lover that she did enjoy being with was English writer Ronald Blythe, who was homosexual.

He found her a 'strange, mysterious woman - lesbian but she found men's bodies beautiful.' 

She found professional success in 1950 with her debut Novel, Strangers On A Train, which was adapted into a Alfred Hitchcock blockbuster a year later.

The book, which set the tone for Highsmith's portfolio of psychological thrillers, told the suspenseful tale of two men proposing to 'trade' murders.

Overall, she wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories. Other top hits included The Blunderer, Deep Water, This Sweet Sickness and The Cry of the Owl.

Patricia Highsmith pictured at her home in Aurigeno, Switzerland in June 1985

Overall, she wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories. Other top hits included The Blunderer, Deep Water, This Sweet Sickness and The Cry of the Owl 

Only once did she write a specifically lesbian novel. On her agent's advice, The Price of Salt was published in 1952 under a pseudonym, 'Claire Morgan'.

Unlike her other novels, The Price of Salt ended happily. In 1984, with culture having become more progressive, she published re-published it under her own name. 

The film was adapted for the big screen in 2015 production Carol, with Cate Blanchett in the starring role.  

Critic David Sexton wrote of Highsmith: 'She had no basic human warmth, no natural affection for what we all share. She herself says so, over and over again, quite clearly.'

Otto Penzler, Highsmith's publisher, said of the novelist when she died in 1995: 'She was a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being. I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly.'

But, with admirable honesty, he added: 'But her books... brilliant.'