The Tremor of Forgery

Howard Ingham has come to Hammamet, Tunisia to work on a film script. He waits for his fiancée Ina, who cables to say she is delayed, then cables again to say she is not coming, then stops writing altogether. A colleague from home, Jensen, arrives and dies — possibly by suicide. And one night, in the dark of his bungalow, something moves, and Ingham strikes out with his portable typewriter, and something falls from the window into the darkness below.

He doesn’t know if he hit anyone. He doesn’t look. The next day everything appears normal.

The Tremor of Forgery is Highsmith’s most existential novel — the question at its centre is not whether Ingham committed a crime but whether it matters to him that he might have, and what it means about a person when the answer is: not very much. The Tunisian heat, the foreignness, the expatriate freedom from the social network that normally makes guilt legible — all of it accelerates a moral dissolution that might have taken years in New Jersey. Critics have compared it to Camus’s The Stranger, and the comparison is not excessive.

Reading Guides

• Patricia Highsmith Books in Order
• Where to Start with Patricia Highsmith

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Tremor of Forgery apart: The North African setting is rendered with unusual specificity and heat; The philosophical dimension — does it matter if you did it? — is genuinely unsettling; and Highsmith’s coolest, most detached prose style. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Tremor of Forgery give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Moral dissolution as something the heat and expatriate displacement accelerates. The question of culpability when certainty is impossible. Highsmith’s most Camus-influenced novel — the murder in the sun. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

Craft and Construction

What lifts The Tremor of Forgery above the competent is the control Patricia Highsmith exercises over pacing and information. The reader is never ahead of the story, but neither is the mystery artificially maintained by withholding plausible deductions. The solution arrives feeling earned rather than arbitrary — the definitive test of plot construction in crime and thriller fiction.

Limitations

The most deliberately slow of her novels — requires patience. The absence of conventional thriller mechanics will frustrate some readers. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Highsmith fans; readers who prefer literary to genre thriller; fans of Bowles and Camus

Tunisia and Moral Uncertainty

The Tremor of Forgery was published in 1969. Howard Ives, an American screenwriter, has travelled to Tunis to work with a director on a film project. The director never arrives. Ives stays on in the heat, in a rented house, in a social world he understands imperfectly. One night he may or may not have killed an intruder who entered his apartment. The body, if there was a body, is gone. No one reports a missing person. The police are uninterested.

The Unresolved Centre

The novel is Highsmith’s most deliberately unresolved: the central question of whether a crime was committed is never answered. Ives himself is uncertain. The narrative proceeds on the assumption that uncertainty is itself the interesting condition — not a puzzle to be solved but a permanent feature of experience in a country whose logic is foreign to the protagonist. Tunisia, in Highsmith’s handling, is not an exotic backdrop but a specific environment in which the epistemological confidence that sustains Western moral categories begins to erode. Critics who admire The Tremor of Forgery tend to value it precisely for this quality — the willingness to produce a novel in which the usual satisfactions of resolution are withheld — while those who find it unsatisfying are frustrated by the same feature. It is, by some measures, Highsmith’s most ambitious formal experiment.

The Novel’s Title and Tunisia

The title The Tremor of Forgery refers both to the specific physical sensation of striking a typewriter key and to the broader act of falsification — the tremor of producing something that passes for reality without being it. Ingham is a writer, and the novel circles repeatedly around the relationship between the fiction a writer produces and the life he is living while he produces it. In Tunisia, working on a screenplay whose director has not arrived, Ingham is in the condition of a professional fiction-maker whose usual contexts have been stripped away: he has no American social network to perform normalcy for, no domestic routine to anchor him to the ordinary moral world, no relationship that imposes its demands. What remains is the writing — and the uncertain event of that night with the typewriter. Highsmith was herself living in Europe during this period, and the novel draws on her experience of what expatriate life removes from a person as well as what it provides. The specific quality of the Tunisian setting — the heat, the Islamic context, the particular quality of light in Hammamet — is rendered with the accuracy of someone who had been there rather than imagined it. The novel’s protagonist is named Howard Ingham throughout; some summaries have confused him with the “Howard Ives” of an early draft, but the published text is clear. Highsmith considered it one of her own favourite novels, and its reputation has grown steadily among critics interested in the philosophical dimensions of her work.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Highsmith’s most existential novel — set in Tunisia, a meditation on moral dissolution in the heat, and the question of whether an act you’re uncertain you committed is one you’re responsible for.