Small G: A Summer Idyll [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

This final book from esteemed crime writer Highsmith, who died in 1995, is more a complement to her pseudonymous lesbian novel Price of Salt than to her better known Ripley thrillers. The action centers on Jakob's, a pub in Zurich known as "Small g" for its "partially gay" clientele. A colorful clash of characters meet and mingle at Small g, including Rickie, a self-consciously aging gay man; Luisa, a young seamstress with a troubled past; Renate, Luisa's controlling and viciously homophobic employer and landlady; and Renate's neohenchman, Willi, a sinister and brooding halfwit. Following the stabbing death of Petey, Rickie's young lover, Rickie befriends Luisa, who had once been his rival for Petey's affections. They similarly both fall for and lust after the fetching Teddie, whose arrival at Small g triggers an escalating series of disastrous events. While Highsmith's last book--only now published in the U.S.-- does not live up to its potential as a suspense thriller, it does offer an intriguing exploration of gay culture and the complexities of love, jealousy, possessiveness, and friendship. Misha Stone
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"All the qualities we love about Highsmith's work . . . are here in abundance . . . her characters astonish themselves, and us, by discovering love in the very last places they ever expected to find it."

In unmistakable Highsmithian fashion, "Small g," Patricia Highsmith's final novel, opens near a seedy Zurich bar with the brutal murder of Petey Ritter. Unraveling the vagaries of love, sexuality, jealousy, and death, Highsmith weaves a mystery both hilarious and astonishing, a classic fairy tale executed with a characteristic penchant for darkness. Published in paperback for the first time in America, "Small g" is at once an exorcism of Highsmith's literary demons and a revelatory capstone to a wholly remarkable career. It is a delightfully incantatory work that, in the tradition of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," shows us how bizarre and unpredictable love can be.

Six months after his gay partner is brutally murdered, Rickie mourns at a local bar alongside his dancing dog, a possessive seamstress, and her beautiful apprentice, and when the seamstress conspires to thwart the others' infatuation with a newcomer, Rickie and the apprentice retaliate with humorous results. Reprint.10,000 first printing.