Bradford clearly does not admire Highsmith as a person ... More convincing is Bradford’s appraisal of Highsmith’s genius as a writer ... Bradford makes his case convincingly, and notes that Highsmith chose lovers who were either socially or intellectually her superior ... Others will seek to untangle her tormented psyche, but Bradford’s has the edge over the two previous biographies by Wilson and Joan Schenkar, if only because it is less than half the length of either.

There is something compelling about a person so totally indifferent to social norms, but can you make readers care about her? ... Bradford doesn’t, in contrast to his predecessors ... The merit of Bradford’s book, for those who can slog through all the sordid details and judgmental appraisals, is the substantive argument he makes that Highsmith deliberately courted emotional violence in her life as fuel for her fiction ... Bradford provides similarly interesting exegeses of autobiographical echoes in other Highsmith novels, but this generally valuable material gets lost in an endless parade of lovers and equally endless litany of Highsmith’s appalling personal conduct. Glaringly absent is substantive analysis of the writer’s tortured bond with her mother, Mary, to which Bradford devotes perfunctory attention in a brief chapter on her childhood and declines to evaluate in a peculiarly noncommittal three-page account of Mary’s cataclysmic 1964 visit to her daughter in London ... Later chapters become a depressing catalogue of bad books and bad health ... It’s characteristic of this intelligent but alienating text, which works better as literary criticism than biography, that Bradford feels no need to display any compassion for such a sad, lonely end.

... an engaging life of the author ... Bradford crafts a dramatic portrait ... Bradford illuminates Highsmith’s talents and pitfalls by connecting them to her work. Bradford skillfully argues that Highsmith’s novels, even the ones not as well known, offer clues to the author’s personality. For those familiar with Highsmith’s novels, Devils, Lusts, and Strange Desires should deepen their understanding, while hopefully encouraging those just encountering her work to read further.

All of this is fascinating, but it is not really new ... Bradford is much less interested in [a] sociological approach, preferring to pathologise Highsmith instead. At one level this makes sense—her virulent antisemitism, misogyny and general awfulness really can’t be explained away by cultural fault lines. But at the other it does mean that Bradford’s Highsmith becomes a figure bordering on the grotesque. There’s also something odd about the way he deals with what he terms Highsmith’s 'lesbian inclinations.' One minute he sounds like a maiden aunt, the next like a voyeur ... The result is a biography that manages to be both plodding and salacious at the same time.

Mr. Bradford gives a vivid sense of those formative years, deftly compressing the baggier episodes, and he conveys with similar economy Highsmith’s early experiences in New York City ... Mr. Bradford’s consideration of her fiction is more methodical than it is perceptive...and he bewilderingly ignores other writers of the period such as Ross Macdonald, Kenneth Fearing and William Lindsay Gresham, whose novels also transcended, some of them magnificently, the noir crime category. In this comparatively slim volume, it is as though Highsmith has elbowed any likely competitors off the page ... Highsmith, that mistress of deception, seems to elude her latest biographer.

[Bradford] consults her extensive notebooks and jottings in order to construct and flesh out a timeline of her lovers, and, oddly, the tone of that endeavor throughout is vaguely aggrieved, as though there’s some long-standing historical imbalance to redress...Giving them such prominence smacks of giving the biography a topical angle, always a doomed approach to life-writing ... Equally dicey, when chronicling a novelist’s life, to view everything as notebook jottings. Bradford is all over the terrain on the point ... One thing is clear: if you’re going to claim in your autobiography of an author that the author’s novels are all exercises in autobiography, your readings of that author’s novels should be superbly penetrating...Bradford’s readings of Highsmith often verge on the banal, although they can sometimes raise interesting points ... at least one goal here is to write a ‘gay life’ of this famously bristly and repellant author. This is a necessarily reductive aim, not least because it works at cross purposes to all other aims. The Patricia Highsmith presented to readers in these pages is indeed a creature of lust and lies - but too often merely so, reduced to squalid trysts and corrosive dependencies. Her strange desires never entirely defined her, but they define this book.

As the ill-advised title might suggest, the book is a sad mess: shallow, mistake-ridden, voyeuristic in tone. It’s hard to get through ... He seems, in any case, to have done very little original research, and most damningly (as far as I can tell), no new interviews. Any lively quotes or choice anecdotes almost always turn out to be borrowed or paraphrased from Wilson or Schenkar. There are proofreading gaffes throughout, including a shocking number of grammatical errors ... Bradford’s responses to Highsmith’s personality and achievement are even more disturbing ... Bradford is curiously unwilling to grant Highsmith’s own erotic life much real-world heft or relate it to any obvious historical context ... rather than acknowledge the homophobic attitudes of the era or, god forbid, the necessary but exhausting apparatus of self-concealment known as the closet, Bradford finds it more plausible to argue that Highsmith kept her sex life under wraps because her ‘lovers’ weren’t real ... Bradford becomes oddly derisory about Highsmith’s fiction—each new novel, he complains, seems more inept and implausible than the last—but he is even more hostile to the woman herself, in an ultimately tedious, dull-edged and deadening way ... By the end, not surprisingly, Bradford seems overtaken by a kind of reductive mania.

The earlier books were more empathetic with their subject than the present one. Wilson, for instance, keenly observes the striking destruction of Patricia Highsmith’s initially beautiful face: a walking, talking, gin-guzzling picture of Dorian Gray ... What is the use of yet another life of Highsmith? With little sympathy for his subject, Richard Bradford sees the origin of Highsmith’s plots in her destructive relationships with women of higher social standing. It’s possible, but who could ever solve the mystery of creation? It may be relationship drama, or a childhood trauma, or a dream, or a fleeting impression: a face glimpsed in a crowd, a moth circling a light bulb. What makes the present biography poignant, is that there’s no redemption for a life of restlessness, despair, and torturous, doomed affairs. All the pain that drove Highsmith into that no-woman’s-land of loathing and loneliness might have indeed inspired her books. Regardless, here is a life—and, finally, an art—consumed by alcohol and isolation, a reminder that things don’t necessarily work out in the end, even for the most talented among us.

Biography as blood sport is one way to describe Richard Bradford’s Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires ... Bradford’s life is based on hate alone ... Highsmith was what William Hazlitt called 'a good hater,' and in this respect alone Bradford and his subject are well suited ... catastrophic literalism...defines his style ... Highsmith seems vastly more courageous and complex than Bradford allows. An entirely different person, in fact. Her hatreds were born of self-hatred and her self-hatred was fueled by the persecution of queers ... how could Bradford, having visited the Highsmith archive and scanned eight thousand pages of lacerating self-analysis, not feel at least some sympathy for his subject, or have gained at least some understanding of how the popular and optimistic student became the rancid and pessimistic recluse? The answer is that Bradford did not consult the fifty-six diaries and cahiers at all during the writing of his biography. His book’s argument depends entirely on quotations, taken out of context, from the journals selected by Highsmith’s earlier biographers ... Bradford replaces analysis and research with opinion ... It is because Bradford deals in literalisms that he misses Highsmith’s irony, is baffled by the doublethink of her two diaries, and confounded by her sexuality. It is also why he can make no sense of her figurative language.

... oddly disapproving, compelling ... Even if he is suspicious about Highsmith’s every word, Bradford seems happy to accept the opinions of nameless strangers, such as the psychiatrist who decided Highsmith was a psychopath because of the expression on her face. At the time she was sitting in the hall outside a party, alone and humiliated, after a disastrous attempt to socialise with English bohemians in the 1960s. Sympathy for her, here and elsewhere, is lacking from this biography ... The other thing missing is Highsmith’s own voice. Brief synopses of the books convey only the basic plots, which seem flat and unconvincing ... What you don’t get here is any sense of the charm she must have possessed to seduce so many women (and an occasional man) ... Bradford rightly points out that many of those who admire her as a lesbian icon would be horrified by the real woman. This book is a valuable corrective to more unquestioning portrayals of her ... What’s lacking is any sense of empathy, as if the sins of Highsmith’s later life cancel out her earlier achievements ... It’s hard to see why Bradford’s Highsmith deserves a biography, sceptical as he is about her literary merit and her personal morals. You have to guess at her talent and charm from the shadows they cast across this book, a work as dark as anything Highsmith herself ever wrote.

As [Bradford] tracks her life and relationships, he pauses, often with surprising brevity, to link elements of plot or characterization in a Highsmith novel to contemporaneous events in her life. Perhaps because of their brevity, these conclusions can come across as tenuously supported or even hasty and superficial ... Most surprising of all, Bradford seems singularly unappreciative of the consistent quality of Highsmith’s crime fiction, as if his whole enterprise as biographer were a painful duty ... Bradford’s dismissive view of her work is not likely to sit well with Highsmith’s legion of 21st-century fans ... we’re left with the rebellious life and outspoken personality of Highsmith, which Bradford, citing her previous biographers, traces accurately and vividly. The curious neophyte might well be satisfied with Bradford’s thoroughly indexed book for a quick introduction to Highsmith’s life, a saga that’s particularly well summarized in his excellent first chapter ... Bradford is a reliable reporter on this disillusioning reality, yet he’s oddly disinclined to an appreciation of his subject’s fiction.

Richard Bradford’s Devils, Lusts, and Strange Desires is the third biography of Highsmith to emerge in recent years, and it is by far the most lurid. As is clear from the very first page, which stopped me in my tracks, this is a biography that relishes in the worst that Highsmith thought, said and did. What is unclear, and on this topic Bradford’s analysis is very good, is to what extent the murderous impulses recorded in Highsmith’s diaries were 'real' or an imaginative rehearsal for her novels. Bradford suggests that Highsmith embedded as many truths, lies and manipulative games in her diaries as she did in her novels, a strategy possibly designed to frustrate future biographers ... Highsmith’s love life was a roller coaster of attraction, obsession, alcoholism and trauma, but a more nuanced biography would contextualize this toxic brew within the homophobia and misogyny of the time. This is not that biography. Nonetheless, readers looking to immerse themselves in stories of very bad behavior will enjoy this deadly cocktail.

... [an] engrossing biography ... Though it breaks little new ground, the book is a happy mixture of biography and criticism. Near its end, Bradford, in judgment, refers to Highsmith’s 'execrable true self.' Readers will find it hard to disagree.

Bradford’s portrait of Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) is occasionally compelling but largely consumed by an unsettling, didactic preoccupation with Highsmith’s same-sex promiscuity ... Bradford’s apparent distaste regarding her many lesbian encounters makes for an uncomfortable reading experience. The author develops some interesting and convincing parallels between Highsmith’s literary creations and real-life relationships ... What is concerning here is not their similarities [Highsmith's and her character Ripley's] but rather Bradford’s hyperbole in labeling Highsmith and Ripley as 'sexual predators' ... labeling her a sexual predator is a mischaracterization. Here, as elsewhere in the biography, it is unclear which insights are gained from honest analysis of available material rather than authorial judgment. The potential for a nuanced analysis of Highsmith’s complicated life is clouded by a sanctimonious tone.

... provocative ... Bradford’s psychosexual interpretations of Highsmith’s 'sadomasochistic catastrophes,' however, sometimes strain credulity ... Still, fans of Highsmith’s work are sure to gain a deeper appreciation for the exceptional writer and her complicated life.