Bookbag: Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (II)

A Suspension of Mercy reads like an expose of the crime writer at work, a literary hall of mirrors in which reality and fiction are constantly reflected and, ultimately, confused. Sydney is a man seduced by fantasy—the imaginative game of killing his wife, Alicia, carrying her body out in a rolled-up carpet and burying her in a field. [...] After months of repressed resentment toward his wife, Sydney imagines killing her, visualizing the murder in detail, positioning her as a character in one of his stories. Sydney then acts out the murder, buries the empty carpet, and records the fantasy in his notebook, written from the perspective of a guilty man...

Sydney, like Highsmith, is driven by the desire to understand why some people commit murder, but when—after learning of Alicia's suicide—he forces his wife's lover Tilbury to take an overdose of sleeping pills, his novelistic imagination fails him. Ironically, the self-conscious, omnipotent author, so in control of his characters, becomes a mere character himself: "it dawned on him that he hadn't remembered to think what it felt like to commit a murder while he was committing it. He had not thought at all about himself."