Those Who Walk Away

Ray Garrett’s wife Peggy killed herself, or maybe she didn’t — the ambiguity is part of what makes the novel uncomfortable. Her father, Ed Coleman, has decided that Ray is responsible and has tried to kill him in a hotel room in Rome. Ray survived. And then neither of them left.

Venice in winter: the canals, the fog, the off-season emptiness, the maze of calli that make pursuit and evasion equally effortless. Coleman hunts Ray through the city and its islands; Ray, who could leave, does not leave — is drawn back by something he cannot name, some need to remain close to the man who blames him, who loved Peggy, who is the last remaining connection to a loss that has not yet become real.

Those Who Walk Away is one of Highsmith’s most atmospheric novels, and the one in which Venice does the most work — the city is not backdrop but a participant, its winter light and waterways perfectly expressing the grief and mutual fixation at the novel’s core. It is less tightly plotted than her American novels, but that looseness is deliberate: this is a novel about people who cannot resolve what happened to them, in a city that offers no resolution.

Reading Guides

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

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Those Who Walk Away apart: Venice is rendered with unusual bleakness — winter, fog, the off-season; The grief at the novel’s core is genuinely felt; and The ambiguity about who is hunting whom is brilliantly maintained. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Those Who Walk Away give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Venice as a city of labyrinths perfectly suited to pursuit and evasion. Grief as something that creates rather than prevents violence. The bond between hunter and hunted as a form of intimacy. 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 Those Who Walk Away 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 plot is looser than her American novels. Slower pacing than her best thrillers. 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 visiting Venice and Italy

Venice and the Pursuit

Those Who Walk Away was published in 1967 and is set entirely in Venice — canals, pensioni, the fog of the autumn lagoon. Ray Garrett’s wife Peggy has recently killed herself in Rome. Her father, Ed Coleman, holds Ray responsible and has attempted to shoot him. The novel follows their strange mutual pursuit through Venice and the nearby islands: Ed attempting to find and kill Ray, Ray aware of Ed and unable entirely to avoid him.

Venice as Highsmith’s Landscape

Highsmith set several novels and many stories in Italy, and Venice in particular suited her purposes: a city of partial visibility, of surfaces and reflections, where the geography itself makes surveillance natural and escape difficult. Ray Garrett is passive even by Highsmith’s standards — he does not fight back, does not report Coleman to the police, seems to accept the pursuit as a condition of his grief rather than a threat to be neutralised. The novel has been read as a study in survivor’s guilt — the way that grief, if sufficiently complete, can make a person complicit in their own destruction. It is less well known than the Ripley novels or the major standalone works, but its atmosphere — the winter lagoon, the empty churches, the fog that makes the familiar city strange — is among the most sustained pieces of location writing in Highsmith’s work.

The Title and Its Meaning

The title comes from Ursula K. Le Guin’s story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” but Highsmith’s novel predates that story by six years, and the phrase carries a different weight in her context. In Those Who Walk Away, the people who walk away are those who survive a loss and then, instead of rebuilding at a distance, continue to circle the wound — they walk away in the geographical sense, moving through Venice, crossing to Murano and Burano and the outer islands, but they do not walk away from the relationship between them. Coleman is supposed to be a man who has walked away from his grief by redirecting it into murderous intent; Ray is supposed to be a man who has walked away from the relationship by leaving Rome. Neither has. The city of Venice, with its circular geography and its streets that return you to where you started, is the perfect embodiment of this: a labyrinth designed to prevent walking away in any final sense. Highsmith’s achievement is to use the specific topography of a real place — the vaporetto routes, the winter fog over the lagoon, the way the light changes on the water at different hours — to express an abstract psychological condition: the impossibility of clean departure, the way grief and guilt create their own gravitational field. She knew Venice well, having lived in Europe for most of her adult life, and the city’s geography is rendered from memory rather than research.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 3.9/5 — A Venice novel saturated in grief and mutual fixation — two men who cannot separate from each other even as one wants to kill the other.