From The Paris Review - "Snail envy animated the life of Patricia Highsmith, whose obsession with snails and their slimy sexual habits fills Joan Schenkar’s recent biography The Talented Miss Highsmith. A friend described Highsmith as “the woman who produced snails from her handbag and encouraged them to leave sticky trails all over her host’s tabletop.” She kept them as pets and carried them across borders in cheese cartons when she traveled, while her own fiction includes enough mentions of mollusks to merit a dissertation. There’s the short story “Two Disagreeable Pigeons” whose eponymous couple make their way around London harboring the hope that “rain would bring the worms out, maybe a snail or two.” Vic, the keeper of aquaria in the novel Deep Water, has a thousand or so snails that are mostly the product of one mating pair, Edgar and Hortense. Hortense takes her name from Highsmith’s own favorite gastropod, one of the three hundred snails that flew with her from New York to Paris, Rome, and Venice. Another one of her characters, Professor Avery Claveringi, leaves the safety of tenure at a California university to search for a giant snail species not yet named. “The Quest for Blank Claveringi” chronicles the professor’s efforts, including the uncanny moment when he spies his first fifteen-foot-tall mollusk: “It resembled a peach-colored sail filled with wind, and the sunlight made nacreous, silvery patches gleam and twinkle as the great thing stirred.” The hunter becomes the hunted when Claveringi’s snails chase him into the sea, leaving him to decide between drowning and being devoured".