The murder reflected in a pair of spectacles, the merry-go-round that whirls out of control, the hand waving through the grille of a drain. Everyone who has seen the classic Hitchcock film of Patricia Highsmith’s “Strangers on a Train” can call up one of its disturbing images. The 1951 movie transformed the fortunes of a young writer, who was still in her twenties when the book—her first novel—was published. But Hitchcock, in bringing the story to the screen, neutered it. Highsmith’s novel puts forward an outrageous proposition—that a psychopath can persuade a clean-cut, law-abiding stranger that each of them should kill on behalf of the other. And it proceeds to prove that this is not only feasible but inevitable: both men go on to commit murder. In the Hitchcock version, however, only the psychopath kills. Memorable though the film is, it pulls back from the novel’s most disturbing implications to become, at bottom, another Hollywood good-guy, bad-guy story.

Filmmakers have always been drawn to Highsmith’s novels, with their tightly wound plots about the normality of violence, their disquieting, myopic closeups (cigarette ash on a dinner plate, an angry pimple on a character’s face), and their deadpan style, which invites a range of interpretations. Her 1954 novel “The Blunderer” was filmed, by Claude Autant-Lara, as “Le Meurtrier” in 1963. Claude Miller made “This Sweet Sickness” (1960) into “Dites-Lui Que Je L’Aime,” in 1977. The same year, Wim Wenders cast Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz in “The American Friend,” his version of “Ripley’s Game”—the third in a series of five novels featuring Highsmith’s most alluring sociopath, the American expatriate in Europe Tom Ripley. (The first three Ripley novels have just been published by Knopf’s Everyman’s Library in a handsome one-volume edition.)

Anthony Minghella’s forthcoming “The Talented Mr. Ripley” is the second screen adaptation of the 1955 novel that launched the Ripley series. Nearly forty years ago, René Clément had one of his biggest successes with “Plein Soleil” (the English title was “Purple Noon”), starring Alain Delon as Ripley. As Hitchcock had done with “Strangers,” Clément softened the story of a young man—Ripley—who murders a friend in order to assume the victim’s identity. Rather than letting the urbane killer evade the law, as Highsmith had done, the French director ended the film with his imminent arrest. “I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial,” Highsmith once wrote, “for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.” Early reports of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” indicate that Minghella, who directed “The English Patient,” has done some softening of his own, giving Ripley’s murder of his friend Dickie Greenleaf a conventional “psychological” motive—the crime is provoked by spurned homosexual advances. Even the best directors have quailed at the author’s audaciousness, her flouting of moral certainties, her lack of interest in psychological explanations.

Highsmith’s critical reputation has been ambiguous. For years, she was corralled—as the distinguished British writer Ruth Rendell has often been—by book-review editors into the sort of “crime corner” slot that protects “literary” fiction from the perceived pollution of murder mysteries. But Highsmith’s novels constitute a genre of their own. Rather than engaging the reader with the solution to a crime or the thrill of a chase, they invite us to observe life as a cunningly devised trap from which there is, as events accumulate, no escape. (In the case of Ripley, the trap is that of a man who cannot escape the life of an escape artist.) A vicious act usually sets things in motion, but not always: there is no violence in one of Highsmith’s most harrowing novels, “Edith’s Diary” (1977), only the gradual suffocation of an individual’s spirit. Her subjects’ state of mind is afflicted by a kind of creeping airlessness. The same can be said of her prose, which registers every action—violent or not—in the same matter-of-fact way, so that the reader’s sense of perspective becomes that of a Seeing Eye dog.

Highsmith found her style early on, and stuck to it. She never made it onto lists of great contemporary women novelists, but she attracted some notable supporters. She rewrote “Strangers on a Train” at the Yaddo writers’ colony, thanks to a recommendation by Truman Capote. In gratitude to the place, she left Yaddo her entire estate, worth an estimated three million dollars, when she died, in 1995. Another Highsmith fan, Graham Greene, remarked in his introduction to her 1970 book “The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories” that “she has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger, with the head half turned over the shoulder.” More recently, the playwright David Hare observed, “I’ve always loved Patricia Highsmith’s work, because behind it lies the claim that, once you set your mind to it, any one human being can destroy any other.”