`Family life, no thanks'

Anthony Minghella's fascinating new film, The Talented Mr Ripley, is based on the 1955 novel by Patricia Highsmith, an author whose 30-plus books are much more complex than the labels "mystery" or "suspense fiction" would suggest. The film starts out in a disarmingly conventional way - a shy young American man, played by Matt Damon, gets himself taken under the wing of two gorgeous, rich expatriates (Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow) in an Italian village - but it gradually reveals itself as a study of desire between men.

Audiences might assume that the gay elements have been added in an attempt to give the 1955 source a trendy makeover for the year 2000, but actually Highsmith's novel is very frank about the sexual tension between the male characters. Gay and lesbian themes, in fact, were central to Highsmith's work for five decades.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1921, the only child of two commercial artists, Patricia Highsmith grew up in New York. After getting a BA in English and Classics, she worked as a department store saleswoman and a writer of plots for comic books. She travelled extensively in Mexico and the American south-west before settling in Europe for good in 1963, living first in Suffolk, then in France, then (from 1982) in Switzerland. Though she had lovers of both sexes, she was famously solitary. In a 1980 interview she described her sole attempt to live with someone as "catastrophic" and concluded wryly: "So, the pleasures of family life, no, thanks."

A tough-minded, bleak but stylish writer, Patricia Highsmith won consistent success with novels which revolve around murder but owe more to Poe, Dickens and Sartre than to conventional crime writing. "Art has nothing to do with morality," she wrote in her 1966 study of suspense fiction. She specialised in creating a tense atmosphere around socially deviant characters who take charge of their own fates but are gripped by obsession and guilt. Generally she preferred characters with a male point of view, seeing them as more active and daring than women: "Men can do more," she insisted in a 1977 interview.

Male homo-eroticism was present from the start of her career in her debut novel Strangers on a Train (1950), which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. This disturbing portrait of a killer who drags a stranger into a murder pact offers a central image for her entire oeuvre: one man relentlessly pursuing another. In The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), Tom Ripley is a young con-man who dreams of living with his glamorous new friend Dickie Greenleaf (Law) in intimate brotherhood for the rest of their lives.

Sexually inexperienced, Ripley is preoccupied with handsome men and generally disgusted by women; three of the main characters accuse Ripley of being "queer", though he keeps denying it. Desire and violence are inextricably linked in this book; Ripley thinks "He could have hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard," just before he bludgeons Dickie to death with a very phallic oar.

The main difference between the book and Anthony Minghella's screenplay is that Matt Damon's Ripley is much more innocent and likeable than Highsmith's protagonist, and seems to kill out of spurned love of the manipulative Dickie rather than sexually charged rage. The most significant change is that a very minor character from the book, Peter Smith-Kingsley, is given a central role - played with sexy warmth by Jack Davenport - and is presented as Ripley's one chance of true love. So whereas the book ends with a cool closure, Minghella's film sweeps to a romantic and deeply tragic climax.

Highsmith went on to produce four more Ripley novels at intervals until 1991. Focusing on disguises and art forgery, they constantly undercut the idea of an authentic identity. Although the increasingly amoral Tom Ripley has a placid and rather sexless marriage to a Frenchwoman, he remains preoccupied with - and kills only - men. His stifled homo-eroticism is most obvious in The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), in which he and a parricidal American teenager become mutually infatuated. Ripley brings the boy to a Berlin gay bar to amuse himself with what he calls the "crazy fantasy" of it all, and in the climactic scene he dresses up in drag borrowed from gay friends to rescue the boy from some (understandably startled!) kidnappers. Though the boy has a girlfriend and Ripley has a wife, the two men "adore" each other; all Ripley can conclude is that "love was strange".

Highsmith also included strong hints of desire between men in other novels, including A Game for the Living, The Two Faces of January and People Who Knock on the Door. But interestingly, she found it much harder to bring herself to publish a book about love between women - because it implicated her personally.

When she turned to lesbian themes in her second book, The Price of Salt (1952), she was afraid - as she admitted many years later - of being labelled "a lesbian book writer", so she used a pseudonym, Claire Morgan. Despite her worries, this novel sold almost one million copies and brought her sackfuls of grateful letters. Untypically for Highsmith's work, the book has a conventional structure and no-one gets killed. Carol the divorcee and the younger Therese, a saleswoman, are just about the only happy pair of lovers Highsmith ever created.

She captures the subtly shifting balance of power between the two women, and includes not only a lyrical sex scene - one of the only such scenes in her work - but a speech in which Carol declares: "that the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing, that happens between men and women."

The Price of Salt, together with Kate O'Brien's As Music and Splendour, stands out from the mass of lesbian-themed fiction of the 1950s. It was most ahead of its time in its brave ending, in which Carol chooses to stay with Therese, even though it will mean she loses custody of her child.

Only in the 1980s did Patricia Highsmith finally admit to being the author of The Price of Salt, which was reprinted as Carol. Her last decade brought her a new openness about sexuality. Found in the Street (1986) includes gay, lesbian, bisexual and straight characters, but it has a curiously old-fashioned feel, especially when the beautiful Elsie gets battered to death by her girlfriend's ugly, jealous, drug-dealing, ex-girlfriend. Highsmith's last book was Small g: A Summer Idyll (1995), an oddly plot-less study of a wide spectrum of characters in a Zurich bar, whose so-called "idyll" of sexual confusion is interrupted by various violent deaths.

Patricia Highsmith died of cancer in 1995. I imagine that she would have liked Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley, because it shows no explicit sex - she found sex in films embarrassing - and portrays love, in all its guises, as deeply strange.

The Talented Mr Ripley goes on general release from tomorrow