Good, but not that great (by Highsmith standards). A pair of murders. 1st - Kimmel, bookseller of Newark, kills his wife when she gets off at a rest area from being on a long bus ride. 2nd- Walter Stackhouse reads of this story, surmises what happened and begins to consider this plan for his own wife. Finally she does take the fateful bus ride and dies having fallen off a cliff. Did Walter do it? He doesn't think so- he doesn't remember doing it- but probably he did? Tenacious police fellow Corby begins pursuing the matter with increasing intensity- eventually badgering - and physically beating Kimmel into submission. We learn Kimmel rather likes this submissive state (an odd tangent that isn't further explored). No one gives in, but eventually the increasing tension of all involved results in a bloodbath/conclusion as Kimmel was stalking Stackhouse and they collide ... The story itself isn't that great, but the trademark Highsmith portrayal of increasing dislocation from reality and self harm of Stackhouse (the "blunderer") is fascinating as usual. ( )

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Good suspense, but pretty loathsome characters all round. ( )

Awful story. Couldn’t get through it. Well written. ( )

A bit overlong, but interesting enough that I didn’t skim much. Walter is a dope as the title would have you believe and it wasn’t much of a surprise how he ended up. Highsmith’s prose is stellar. I hoped for a plot with a few more surprises than I got, but I still liked the book quite a bit.

Written before the Miranda Warning became mandatory in the US, it’s sometimes really hard to fathom why Walter and Kimmel put up with so much from Corby. Walter is a lawyer and he doesn’t put a stop to Corby’s abuse of him and the system. For the most part, Corby is the bad guy here. He’s a menace and routinely beats up Kimmel for the sport of it. Once even in the cop shop itself. His investigation seemed to have no supervision and made very little sense sometimes. I mean, who cares what W or K think about the other’s guilt, something Corby hammered on repeatedly. He also didn’t arrest K for assault when he could have, and given his vindictiveness you’d think he’d go for it. Maybe policing was really different in the 1950s. There are also liberties taken with how much the newspaper would have printed about Walter and his wife’s death. Maybe I read it with too much modern sensibility, but I did notice how off the rails things seemed to get.

And there was no attempt whatsoever to make either Helen or Clara in the least sympathetic. One was a cheater and the other a manipulative asshole disguised as a neurotic. The thing of it is their repulsiveness didn’t make either husband seem sympathetic either. Both of them were nasty pieces of work in totally different ways. Walter in his idiocy and wishy-washiness, Kimmel with his corpulence and arrogance. Ick. Interesting, but still ick. ( )