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New York (dpa) - Patricia Highsmith has been dead for around 25 years, but the books of the US writer still inspire millions of fans worldwide.
The multi-award-winning author has written around three dozen novels and short stories, including the Tom Ripley books and the lesbian love story "Carol".
Many of them have been successfully filmed, including by star directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Wim Wenders.
Highsmith, who would have turned 100 this Tuesday (January 19), was considered stubborn and shy of publicity throughout her life.
Her diaries, due to be published for the first time this fall, could soon offer new insights into the life of the master of subtle horror.
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According to the Zurich-based Diogenes Verlag, the notebooks and diaries document Highsmith's life from her years as a student in New York to her death in Switzerland in 1995.
The 56 notebooks, which comprise a total of 8,000 pages, were found hidden behind bed linen and towels in their home in Ticino by their editor Anna von Planta and the then publisher Daniel Keel.
Highsmith was born Mary Patricia Plangman in Forth Worth, Texas, in 1921.
Her childhood was a "little hell", said the author later.
The parents divorced at an early age, and Highsmith lived for a few years with a grandmother, then with mother and stepfather in New York.
After school she studied zoology and English, among other things, and began writing short stories.
In 1950 she had her breakthrough with “Two Strangers on a Train”, the story of the almost perfect crime - and the first film template that crime specialist Alfred Hitchcock made just a year later.
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With the money for the first film rights, she went to Europe.
Highsmith lived in Great Britain and France until she finally retired to the small alpine village of Tegna near Locarno in Ticino.
Highsmith avoided the public eye, lived with cats and snails, worked in the house and garden, made furniture, drew, painted - and spent several hours a day at the typewriter.
This is how many novels, short stories and narratives emerged that went beyond the common crime thriller clichés.
Protagonist Tom Ripley, for example, has become one of the great figures of modern world literature as an unscrupulous yet likeable murderer and bon vivant.
"Justice and morality bore me," Highsmith once said.
The works have been translated into numerous languages and sold millions of times, and new film adaptations are still being planned to this day.
Highsmith's literary estate is in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern.
The world rights have the Diogenes Verlag.
A few weeks after completing her last novel "Small g - a summer idyll", Highsmith died on February 4, 1995 of complications from a leukemia and was buried in her small Alpine village.
"When reading her books, however desperate and hopeless they may be," author colleague Peter Handke once said, "you have the feeling of being under the protection of a great writer."
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Patricia Highsmith - Diogenes Publishing House