Those Who Walk Away was published by Harper & Row in 1967 and is perhaps Highsmith’s most atmospheric novel — a pursuit through the empty streets and fogbound canals of winter Venice that operates less as a thriller than as a study of two men locked in a relationship neither can end. It is a novel about the impossibility of closure, about grief that refuses to resolve into either forgiveness or revenge.
The Novel
Ray Garrett is an American art dealer living in Rome, recently widowed. His wife Peggy committed suicide — an act her father, Ed Coleman, blames entirely on Ray. At a gallery opening in Venice, Ed shoots Ray. But Ray survives, and what follows is not a chase in the conventional sense but a strange, protracted dance through Venice’s winter emptiness — two men circling each other, neither able to commit fully to violence or to walk away.
Ed wants Ray dead but lacks the single-mindedness to ensure it. Ray wants to be left alone but keeps gravitating back toward Ed, as if drawn by guilt or a need for punishment. Venice — depopulated, fog-shrouded, labyrinthine — becomes the perfect correlative for their psychological condition: a beautiful city built on uncertain foundations, full of dead ends and reflections.
Highsmith subverts every expectation of the thriller form. There is no escalating action, no ticking clock, no final confrontation that resolves the tension. Instead, the novel enacts the exhausting reality of obsession — the way two people can be bound together by hatred as tightly as by love, and how both relationships resist the clean endings that fiction usually provides.
Venice as Character
Highsmith visited Venice in the off-season and was struck by its quality of absence — the empty hotels, closed restaurants, and fog-obscured architecture creating a landscape that seemed designed for psychological extremity. The city’s physical nature — built on water, connected by bridges, full of hidden passages and sudden dead ends — mirrors the novel’s structure of approach and retreat.
The Venice of Those Who Walk Away anticipates the later use of the city in psychological fiction — Donna Leon’s Brunetti novels, Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers — but Highsmith’s Venice is emptier and stranger, a city drained of tourists and life, where two Americans drift like ghosts through streets meant for crowds.
Themes
The novel’s central concern is the question of responsibility. Did Ray cause Peggy’s suicide? Highsmith never answers definitively. Ray carries guilt but insists he tried to help Peggy. Ed is certain of Ray’s culpability but his certainty seems disproportionate, even pathological. The truth — as always in Highsmith — is less important than the narratives people construct around events.
Those Who Walk Away also explores masculine pride and its distortions. Neither Ed nor Ray can simply leave Venice because doing so would mean surrendering the narrative — admitting defeat or guilt or indifference. They remain locked in their circuit because leaving would require an emotional clarity neither possesses.
Publication and Editions
The first edition was published by Harper & Row, New York, in 1967. First printings are identified by:
- Harper & Row imprint on title page
- First edition code on copyright page
- Price on dust jacket front flap ($4.95)
- Cloth binding with jacket
The UK edition was published by Heinemann (London, 1967).
The novel was popular in France and Germany, where Highsmith’s combination of psychological depth and European settings resonated strongly with readers. The French edition appeared from Calmann-Lévy.
Critical Reception
Contemporary reviews were somewhat puzzled by the novel’s refusal of conventional thriller mechanics. The lack of resolution frustrated readers expecting a climactic confrontation. Later critics have been more appreciative, recognizing Those Who Walk Away as one of Highsmith’s most formally ambitious works — a novel that uses the apparatus of suspense to explore psychological states that cannot be resolved through action.
Michael Dirda praised it as “one of Highsmith’s strangest and most haunting novels,” noting its kinship with European art cinema rather than Anglo-American genre fiction.
Collecting Those Who Walk Away
First edition (Harper & Row, 1967): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $200–$500. Print runs for Highsmith’s 1960s novels were modest, and fine copies with bright, unchipped jackets are not common.
UK first edition (Heinemann, 1967): Similar values, $150–$400.
Signed copies are rare for this title. Highsmith was living in Europe during this period and American first editions are unlikely to have been signed in quantity.
The novel sits in the middle tier of Highsmith collectibles — not as sought-after as the Ripley novels or Strangers on a Train, but increasingly valued by collectors who prize the atmospheric quality and psychological complexity of her 1960s work.