Melinda Van Allen is beautiful, headstrong and sexy. Unfortunately for Vic Van Allen, she is his wife. Their love has soured, and Melinda takes pleasure in flaunting her many affairs to her husband. When one of her lovers is murdered, Vic hints to her latest conquest that he was responsible. As rumours spread about Vic’s vicious streak, fiction and reality start to converge. It’s only a matter of time before Vic really does have blood on his hands.

‘Deep Water’ was my first Patricia Highsmith novel. I picked it up because I was looking for novels that were published in 1957, the year I was born. I knew that Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel was ’Strangers on a Train’ (1950) and that her fourth novel was ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ (1955), but I’d never heard of her fifth novel, ‘Deep Water’, so I went into it expecting something good but not entirely sure what good would mean.

It turned out that good meant dizzyingly strange, quietly disturbing, and completely believable. I can see why Patricia Highsmith has a reputation for having invented the psychological thriller. This didn’t read like a book that’s sixty-nine years old. It was fresh, powerful, original and drew its power from the suppressed but deeply felt dark emotions beneath the surface of a marriage. 

The story immersed me in the world as seen through the eyes of Vic Van Allen, an experience that, from the beginning, had an almost hallucinogenic feel, and became progressively stranger and darker without ever requiring me to suspend my disbelief.

It was clear from the start that Van Allen’s version of reality was just slightly off. Even so, I had no idea of just what he was capable of. 

The original title of the novel was ‘Dog in the Manger’, which was how Van Allen struck me at first. He’s a wealthy man, married to a beautiful woman who is routinely and publicly unfaithful to him in a way that seemed motivated more by a desire to demean and provoke Van Allen than by lust for the men she flirts with. Van Allen’s response was unusual. He was endlessly polite to the men that his wife brought into their home. When one of the men asks him why he is so patient, Van Allen replies that he doesn’t get mad but.. “If I really don’t like somebody, I kill him….” and then implies that he was responsible for the death of one of his wife’s former lovers. Creating this kind of rumour could have felt hollow, implying weakness, but from Van Allen’s lips, it felt like a long-held fantasy forcing its way to the surface. Understanding what lies beneath Van Allen’s surface is what powers the rest of the book. He is the still water that runs deep.

Van Allen’s calm detachment soon became as ominous as it was superficial. He constantly narrates his experience, but the narration felt like a performance, a lie he was telling himself to see how believable it might be. In Van Allen, Patricia Highsmith drew a very plausible picture of a man capable of remorse-free, spontaneous murder who, most of the time, presents a kind, calm, generous, and forgiving face to the world. He is cultured, polite, social and seems devoted to his young daughter. I thought the scariest thing about Van Allen’s behaviour was that he wasn’t about his day-to-day actions weren’t a pretence. They were an honest part of who he is. He is a man who is disturbingly detached from his own life. He lives off inherited wealth, and it seemed to me that he was a dilettante in everything that he did, including being a husband, a father and a killer.

Oddly, perhaps, it wasn’t Van Allen’s violence that I found most disturbing; it was the emotional distance that he maintained from his wife. I only saw Melinda Van Allen through her husband’s eyes, so I couldn’t tell how much of her behaviour was a continuation of who she had always been and how much of it was a reaction to her growing understanding of the nature of the man she had married. To me, she seemed broken and in pain. Her drinking and her flirtations seemed to be ways of dealing with that pain and were perhaps partly motivated by a desire publicly to strip away Van Allen’s calm public persona and show the world the man she glimpsed lurking beneath the surface. I think Van Allen saw this too and watched it with the same detached curiosity he showed when observing his colony of snails. What he refused to acknowledge was that his detachment masked a mix of rage and schadenfreude that his wife’s distress fueled and satisfied. 

The response of the people around Van Allen was almost as disturbing as his own behaviour. His friends are heavily invested in seeing only the polite, respectable, patient persona that Van Allen presents. Their empathy and concern are all for him. They have none for his wife. They judge her harshly but give no thought to Van Allen’s emotional and physical withdrawal from his marriage. The more Melinda Van Allen tries to show her neighbours who Van Allen is, the less she is believed and the more she is censured. This was a nicely crafted example of the patriarchy at work.