The Tremor of Forgery: A Virago Modern Classic

BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY

INTRODUCED BY DENISE MINA

‘Highsmith is a giant of the genre. The original, the best, the gloriously twisted Queen of Suspense’ MARK BILLINGHAM

A gripping novel that explores the shifting sands of moral values - is murder still murder when committed in a lawless place?

Howard Ingham, an American writer, is in Tunisia working on a screenplay, and feeling stranded. No one has written to him since he arrived - neither the film director who he is supposed to be meeting in Tunis, nor his lover in New York. The erratic mail eventually brings news of the director’s suicide. For reasons obscure even to himself, Ingham decides to stay and work on a novel, but a series of events - a hushed-up murder and a vanished corpse - lures him inexorably into the deep, ambivalent shadows of the town; into deceit and away from conventional morality. Ultimately, what is in question is not justice or truth, but the state of his oddly quiet conscience.

‘Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear … Highsmith’s finest novel to my mind is The Tremor of Forgery, and if I were asked what it is about I would reply, apprehension ’ GRAHAM GREENE