This collection of twenty-eight stories spans almost fifty years of Highsmith's career, showing the evolution of the Highsmith oeuvre from her days as a struggling freelance writer in New York City in the early 1940s, to when she was an American expatriate in Switzerland. Many of her early efforts reveal her remarkable gifts for stylistic economy and prose, as well as a mature understanding of human nature. The later stories, written as the author began to acquire a reputation in Europe as a 'literary' suspense writer, encompass the entire range of her writing, from the psychological narrative to the prose farce.