Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
W. W. Norton & Company (2001), Edition: Reprint, 288 pages
Description
For two years, Walter Stackhouse has been a faithful and supportive husband to his wife, Clara. She is distant and neurotic, and Walter finds himself harboring gruesome fantasies about her demise. When Clara's dead body turns up at the bottom of a cliff in a manner uncannily resembling the recent death of a woman named Helen Kimmel who was murdered by her husband, Walter finds himself under intense scrutiny. He commits several blunders that claim his career and his reputation, cost him his friends, and eventually threaten his life. The Blunderer examines the dark obsessions that lie beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary people. With unerring psychological insight, Patricia Highsmith portrays characters who cross the precarious line separating fantasy from reality.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member bcquinnsmom
As far as Highsmith goes, things don't always go the way you think they should in her books. She often does a 180 in terms of reader expectations; in this case, she ended up leaving me a lot more unsettled at the end than I was throughout the story.
The Blunderer examines three different men in
While there are definite similarities between this novel and Strangers on a Train (as in an examination of guilt, the psychology of the individual, and the doppelganger-ish, growing obsession between two men), unlike SOAT, the ending of this one is a definite shocker. But before reaching that point, what I find most interesting about this book just may be the way in which the reader is pretty much manipulated the entire way through the story.
As in the cases of both The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, I found myself constantly being thrown off kilter while reading, but that's what makes Patricia Highsmith such a fine writer, and it's likely why her books are still quite popular half a century or more after they were first published. I don't want just crime, investigation and solution in my reading, and she more than satisfies my need for dark inroads into the psyche. The Blunderer is one I'd most certainly recommend to readers of darker fiction.
The Blunderer examines three different men in
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terms of two of Highsmith's favorite themes, guilt and justice. The first, Kimmel, is a bookstore owner who specializes in obtaining pornography. He's also a murderer [which is not a spoiler since you see the whole thing unravel right away upon opening the book and it's on the back-cover blurb] who believes he's gotten away with killing his wife and feels no remorse; the second is an attorney, Walter Stackhouse, whose neurotic ballbuster of a wife Clara is driving his friends away little by little because of her disapproving attitude and crazy imagination. Unlike Kimmel, Walter only thinks about getting rid of his wife, and on reading the story of Mrs. K's death, becomes obsessed with the way the job was done. At the same time, he also becomes more and more convinced of Kimmel's guilt, becoming fascinated with Kimmel himself, and trots off to his bookstore to take a look at him. When Clara turns up dead (also on the back-cover blurb) in much the same fashion as Kimmel's wife, enter the third party of this strange triangle, the overzealous, overreaching, and over-aggressive police detective investigating Mrs. Kimmel's death. While Kimmel sails along sure of himself as far as the law is concerned, Walter isn't so fortunate -- he is the titular "blunderer," whose stupid mistakes he's made along the way are enough to cause havoc for Walter in so very many ways.While there are definite similarities between this novel and Strangers on a Train (as in an examination of guilt, the psychology of the individual, and the doppelganger-ish, growing obsession between two men), unlike SOAT, the ending of this one is a definite shocker. But before reaching that point, what I find most interesting about this book just may be the way in which the reader is pretty much manipulated the entire way through the story.
As in the cases of both The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, I found myself constantly being thrown off kilter while reading, but that's what makes Patricia Highsmith such a fine writer, and it's likely why her books are still quite popular half a century or more after they were first published. I don't want just crime, investigation and solution in my reading, and she more than satisfies my need for dark inroads into the psyche. The Blunderer is one I'd most certainly recommend to readers of darker fiction.
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LibraryThing member Bookmarque
A bit overlong, but interesting enough that I didn’t skim much. Walter is a dope as the title would have you believe and it wasn’t much of a surprise how he ended up. Highsmith’s prose is stellar. I hoped for a plot with a few more surprises than I got, but I still liked the book quite a
Written before the Miranda Warning became mandatory in the US, it’s sometimes really hard to fathom why Walter and Kimmel put up with so much from Corby. Walter is a lawyer and he doesn’t put a stop to Corby’s abuse of him and the system. For the most part, Corby is the bad guy here. He’s a menace and routinely beats up Kimmel for the sport of it. Once even in the cop shop itself. His investigation seemed to have no supervision and made very little sense sometimes. I mean, who cares what W or K think about the other’s guilt, something Corby hammered on repeatedly. He also didn’t arrest K for assault when he could have, and given his vindictiveness you’d think he’d go for it. Maybe policing was really different in the 195s. There are also liberties taken with how much the newspaper would have printed about Walter and his wife’s death. Maybe I read it with too much modern sensibility, but I did notice how off the rails things seemed to get.
And there was no attempt whatsoever to make either Helen or Clara in the least sympathetic. One was a cheater and the other a manipulative asshole disguised as a neurotic. The thing of it is their repulsiveness didn’t make either husband seem sympathetic either. Both of them were nasty pieces of work in totally different ways. Walter in his idiocy and wishy-washiness, Kimmel with his corpulence and arrogance. Ick. Interesting, but still ick.
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bit.Written before the Miranda Warning became mandatory in the US, it’s sometimes really hard to fathom why Walter and Kimmel put up with so much from Corby. Walter is a lawyer and he doesn’t put a stop to Corby’s abuse of him and the system. For the most part, Corby is the bad guy here. He’s a menace and routinely beats up Kimmel for the sport of it. Once even in the cop shop itself. His investigation seemed to have no supervision and made very little sense sometimes. I mean, who cares what W or K think about the other’s guilt, something Corby hammered on repeatedly. He also didn’t arrest K for assault when he could have, and given his vindictiveness you’d think he’d go for it. Maybe policing was really different in the 195s. There are also liberties taken with how much the newspaper would have printed about Walter and his wife’s death. Maybe I read it with too much modern sensibility, but I did notice how off the rails things seemed to get.
And there was no attempt whatsoever to make either Helen or Clara in the least sympathetic. One was a cheater and the other a manipulative asshole disguised as a neurotic. The thing of it is their repulsiveness didn’t make either husband seem sympathetic either. Both of them were nasty pieces of work in totally different ways. Walter in his idiocy and wishy-washiness, Kimmel with his corpulence and arrogance. Ick. Interesting, but still ick.
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LibraryThing member craso
Walter Stackhouse is more than a blunderer, he’s an idiot. He becomes interested in a newspaper story about a bookstore owner’s wife that was found dead at a bus stop. Walter visits the husband’s shop just to see what a murderer looks like. Walter’s wife is a controlling, neurotic woman who
There is no hero in this story; no one you can root for. You can’t feel sorry for Walter who does everything within his power to make himself look guilty. Kimmel, the husband who actually killed his wife, believes he is above the law and everyone else. Corby is your typical noir police detective who tries to beat and bully a confession out of Kimmel. His tactics would not be tolerated in the modern day police force. The ending is not happy, but is apropos for such a blunderer.
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commits suicide in a way that makes him look guilty of murder. She is found dead near a bus stop. An ambitious police detective, Corby, decides that the similarity between the women’s death is not just coincidence. He sets out to play one man against the other. In the process both men’s lives are destroyed. There is no hero in this story; no one you can root for. You can’t feel sorry for Walter who does everything within his power to make himself look guilty. Kimmel, the husband who actually killed his wife, believes he is above the law and everyone else. Corby is your typical noir police detective who tries to beat and bully a confession out of Kimmel. His tactics would not be tolerated in the modern day police force. The ending is not happy, but is apropos for such a blunderer.
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LibraryThing member sturlington
Highsmith had a reputation for misanthropy, which she does nothing to dispel with this thriller. First, let's take a look at the women characters, such as they are. Two of them are shrill, nagging wives who both die violent deaths, and it seems they deserved them. The last is pretty much a
But Highsmith is obviously more interested in her men than her women, specifically three men. The first is Walter, the titular blunderer, who when his wife supposedly commits suicide by jumping off a cliff during a rest stop on a bus trip, he does pretty much everything he can to make himself look guilty of murder. Walter has none of the misplaced charisma of Highsmith's well-known Ripley character. He is milquetoast, indecisive with his feelings, slow on the uptake, "nothing but a pair of eyes without an identity behind them." After reading a news story, Walter becomes obsessed with a man named Kimmel, who really did murder his wife at a bus stop (as revealed in the first chapter). Kimmel is in every way repulsive, who considers himself so much above the rest of humankind that he can get away with murder; he thinks of himself as "powerful and impregnable as a myth." Highsmith takes care to mention Kimmel's physical appearance at every opportunity, his fatness, his lack of grace and bad eyesight, his repulsive thick lips like a heart.
It takes a lot to get the reader to feel even a modicum of sympathy for such a man, who did, after all, brutally strangle his wife without any sense of remorse whatsoever. However, when Corby, Highsmith's third man, comes into the book, she almost manages to do so. Corby is the police detective obsessed with pinning both deaths on the husbands, by any means necessary. While Walter is stupid and Kimmel is arrogant, Corby comes across as nothing less than evil, which is all the more shocking because he represents justice.
Highsmith turns our expectations upside down and has us rooting for Kimmel and Walter to triumph over Corby. She is an expert manipulator, and it shows in this novel, but after finishing it, I felt icky, contaminated. These are not people I'd care to know, and Highsmith offers no alternatives, not even a hint of one. The world is full of people like these, she seems to be saying; take a close look at anyone and you'll find something to disgust you. So while The Blunderer is a well-written novel and an effective piece of horror, it is not a book I can say that I liked.
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non-character, who falls in love with Walter (the most non-romantic person imaginable) without any provocation whatsoever and spends the rest of the novel not doing much.But Highsmith is obviously more interested in her men than her women, specifically three men. The first is Walter, the titular blunderer, who when his wife supposedly commits suicide by jumping off a cliff during a rest stop on a bus trip, he does pretty much everything he can to make himself look guilty of murder. Walter has none of the misplaced charisma of Highsmith's well-known Ripley character. He is milquetoast, indecisive with his feelings, slow on the uptake, "nothing but a pair of eyes without an identity behind them." After reading a news story, Walter becomes obsessed with a man named Kimmel, who really did murder his wife at a bus stop (as revealed in the first chapter). Kimmel is in every way repulsive, who considers himself so much above the rest of humankind that he can get away with murder; he thinks of himself as "powerful and impregnable as a myth." Highsmith takes care to mention Kimmel's physical appearance at every opportunity, his fatness, his lack of grace and bad eyesight, his repulsive thick lips like a heart.
It takes a lot to get the reader to feel even a modicum of sympathy for such a man, who did, after all, brutally strangle his wife without any sense of remorse whatsoever. However, when Corby, Highsmith's third man, comes into the book, she almost manages to do so. Corby is the police detective obsessed with pinning both deaths on the husbands, by any means necessary. While Walter is stupid and Kimmel is arrogant, Corby comes across as nothing less than evil, which is all the more shocking because he represents justice.
Highsmith turns our expectations upside down and has us rooting for Kimmel and Walter to triumph over Corby. She is an expert manipulator, and it shows in this novel, but after finishing it, I felt icky, contaminated. These are not people I'd care to know, and Highsmith offers no alternatives, not even a hint of one. The world is full of people like these, she seems to be saying; take a close look at anyone and you'll find something to disgust you. So while The Blunderer is a well-written novel and an effective piece of horror, it is not a book I can say that I liked.
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LibraryThing member LynnMoore
I have just found Patricia Highsmith and loved Deep Water, but was disappointed in The Blunderer. There's the same dry sparse style but the main character was indeed the blunderer. He was SO stupid! I want to like the characters, even if they are murderers. I didn't like him.
The book dealt with
The book dealt with
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unhappy marriages which seem to haunt Highsmith but it was really secondary to the plot. It dealt with the husband of one of the dead women, who was innocent and the husband of the second dead woman, who was guilty. The story just meandered too much. Show Less
LibraryThing member christinejoseph
2 men plot to kill wives, one does - other no so curious he gets killed by 1st one — Weird
For two years, Walter Stackhouse has been a faithful and supportive husband to his wife, Clara. She is distant and neurotic, and Walter finds himself harboring gruesome fantasies about her demise. When
For two years, Walter Stackhouse has been a faithful and supportive husband to his wife, Clara. She is distant and neurotic, and Walter finds himself harboring gruesome fantasies about her demise. When
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Clara's dead body turns up at the bottom of a cliff in a manner uncannily resembling the recent death of a woman named Helen Kimmel who was murdered by her husband, Walter finds himself under scrutiny. Show Less
LibraryThing member KatherineGregg
Walter Stackhouse hates his wife Clara. He thinks about doing away with her but in fact does not. Distraught after Walter asks her for a divorce, Clara takes her own life by jumping off a cliff. Through a series of blunders that make Walter look guilty, he becomes the prime suspect in the murder of
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his wife. At the same time, Kimmel, a repulsive man who actually did strangle his wife to death, gets away with murder. A slimy detective investigates both cases and jumps to the wrong conclusions. Show Less
LibraryThing member karav
LOVE this book
LibraryThing member ramrak
Awful story. Couldn’t get through it. Well written.
LibraryThing member JBD1
Good suspense, but pretty loathsome characters all round.
Awards
Julian Symons' 100 Best Crime Stories (1954 — 1956)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1954
ISBN
0393322440 / 9780393322446