F Peters

The Literary Antecedents of Domestic Noir

Patricia Highsmith remains the epitome of the psychologically focused crime fiction author, renowned for her ability to convey extraordinarily high levels of anxiety within and through her novels, not just in the minds of her, often hapless, protagonists but also in those of her readers. However, I will be arguing here that she also deserves recognition as an antecedent of the recent ‘domestic noir’ subgenre. While Highsmith’s protagonists are predominantly male, my contention is that this is no impediment to the particularly ‘feminine’ discourse that she evokes throughout many of her texts.