Critics have been unsure of where to place Patricia Highsmith's work, and it's easy to see why. To call her a 'crime writer' sounds limiting, even patronising, since, like Chabrol, Highsmith is less interested in the mechanics of crimes than in the psychology behind them. On the other hand you can hardly overlook the fact that most of her fictions end up with blood on their hands: she may command a high-art following, but there are those who read her to see how ingeniously and brutally she'll dispose of her characters. Very few of the 12 stories in Slowly, Slowly in the Wind slot neatly into a crime-suspense category, but there's no slackening of invention when it comes to the crunch. Vines sprouting out of a pond drag their victims underwater; a farmer's corpse is hung up as a scarecrow; Madame Thibault's Waxworks Museum acquires three additional exhibits …

The most chilling stories here are those in which the threat of violence or death, and the taking of measures to stave off that threat, have become a part of daily routine…. There's a good deal of class and racial tension in these stories (middle-class whites protecting themselves against down-and-outs and blacks), but the ultimate horror-show is one that a family inflicts on itself: a child dies after swallowing broken glass and sleeping tablets left on the floor by a neglectful mother and drunk father. This story, 'Those Awful Dawns', reads at times like an exaggerated case-study for trainee social workers, but Highsmith's grasp of current social problems is generally greater than she's given credit for and she's at her most macabre when most mundane. (p. 455)