Patriciaphernalia: A Signed Patricia Highsmith Letter Regarding Ripley's Game

I've a number of Patricia Highsmith signed books I've been meaning to blog about for bloody ages – years in fact – but the demands of work and life have meant that my blogging activity has largely been restricted to whichever books I've written or edited myself. However, I'm hoping to make more time for Existential Ennui besides simply blogging about whichever project I'm working on – case in point being my post the other day on Patrick Gierth – and have every intention of getting to those signed Highsmiths soon (and adding them to my dedicated Patricia Highsmith page). First, though, I want to showcase something even more remarkable:

A note Highsmith wrote on 9 February, 1975, regarding her "third Tom Ripley" as she puts it – in other words, 1974's Ripley's Game. The third in Highsmith's five-book Ripliad, Ripley's Game is, as I've noted many, many times, my favourite novel, not just of hers but full stop. I've never managed to secure a signed edition – though I do own a 1974 US Knopf first with an owner inscription by James Bond/Ian Fleming biographer John Pearson – so when I saw this note offered for sale I knew I had to have it so I could pair it with my 1974 Heinemann first edition of Ripley's Game (the book which began my book-collecting odyssey).

Addressed from Highsmith's then-residence in the village of Moncourt, France, where she wrote both Ripley's Game and the next book in the Ripliad, 1980's The Boy Who Followed Ripley (a signed US edition of which I blogged about back in 2017), the note is penned in response to a missive from one Peter Ladkin. An inveterate letter writer judging by the number of other examples of his author letters offered for sale at the same time (he also corresponded with the philosopher and LSE Professor John Watkins), Mr. Ladkin had evidently written approvingly of Ripley's Game, eliciting the following response from Highsmith:

Dear Mr Ladkin,

Don't worry about sending me the cost of return postage. I thank you very much for your remarks about my work and am glad you enjoyed my third Tom Ripley.

Yours sincerely

Patricia Highsmith

As the mention of "return postage" suggests, Mr. Ladkin had also seemingly requested Highsmith's signature and an accompanying inscription, which she duly supplied on a separate piece of paper, presumably so it could be used as a bookplate:

So there we have it: two notes regarding Ripley's Game, written from the house where Patricia Highsmith wrote that novel. Quite the pair of pieces of Patriciaphernalia for a Highsmith/Ripley's Game obsessive like myself.

The Real Tom Ripley? Origins of Patricia Highsmith's Talented Mr. Ripley

A couple of years ago, in this post on The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) – the third novel in the five-book Ripliad – I noted that Patricia Highsmith identified with Tom Ripley more than any other character she created. In her guidebook Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966) she wrote of Tom's debut, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), "No book was easier for me to write, and I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing," while later novels in the Ripliad, The Boy Who Followed Ripley among them, are littered with opinions and asides that are ostensibly Tom's but in fact recognisably those of his creator. Highsmith was even known to sign letters to friends, "Tom".

But Highsmith drew on other sources besides herself in her formulation of Tom Ripley. Andrew Wilson, in his 2003 biography of the author, Beautiful Shadow, points to Julian Green's 1947 body-swapping fantasy If I Were You and Henry James's 1903 novel The Ambassadors as two literary inspirations for Tom and The Talented Mr. Ripley. He also highlights a real life inspiration: a Herald Tribune news story that Highsmith read in 1954 about a man "presumed dead after the discovery of a charred body" who "was spotted drinking after his 'funeral' and... arrested". But there's another real life inspiration for Tom, one that Highsmith herself wrote about in an essay for the Winter 1989 issue (#29) of literary journal Granta.

Titled Scene of the Crime, the essay recaps the events of The Talented Mr. Ripley before turning to "the place where Ripley was born," as Highsmith puts it, "in the sense of being a story-less image in my memory". The place is Positano on the Amalfi Coast, which Highsmith visited for the first time in late summer 1951. (Wilson's biography contradicts this, stating that Highsmith first visited Positano in late summer 1949.) Emerging onto the balcony of her hotel one quiet morning Highsmith "noticed a solitary young man in shorts and sandals with a towel flung over his shoulder, making his way along the beach from right to left. He was looking downward... I could just see that his hair was straight and darkish." She continues:

There was an air of pensiveness about him, maybe unease. And why was he alone? He did not look like the athletic type who would take a cold swim alone at an early hour. Had he quarrelled with someone? What was on his mind? I never saw him again. I did not even write anything in my cahier about him. What would there have been to say? He looked like a thousand other American tourists in Europe that summer. I had the feeling that he was American.

The image of the solitary young man returned to Highsmith months later on her second trip to Europe when an idea for a story occurred to her, "...of a young American drifter being sent to Europe to bring another American back home, if possible". (Highsmith admits at this point the similarity of her notion to The Ambassadors.) Yet when she actually came to write The Talented Mr. Ripley, she was "not sure that the Positano beach image with the solitary figure even came to my mind", although Positano itself made it into the novel – and onto the dust jacket of the 1957 British first edition – as Mongibello. It was only "years later [when] journalists asked me, 'Where did you get the idea of Ripley from?' and as I racked my mind to answer, to recall exactly where, [that] the solitary figure on the beach returned to me, and I described his appearance – as I had seen it from two hundred metres or more".

Highsmith writes in closing:

The stretch of the Positano beach, which has not changed much except that it may now hold a few more boats or people, has no particular fascination for me. Ripley was not really born there, was just an image for me, and needed another element to spring to life: imagination, which came many months later.

Singular Points of View: Patricia Highsmith and A Dog's Ransom (Heinemann, 1972)

NB: Linked in this Friday's Forgotten Books, 19/6/15.

Patricia Highsmith wrote all of her novels and short stories in the third-person singular (past tense), arguing – in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966, revised 1981) – that "first-person singular is the most difficult form in which to write a novel". She added:

I have bogged down twice in first-person-singular books, so emphatically that I abandoned any idea of writing the books. I don't know what was the matter, except that I got sick and tired of writing the pronoun "I", and I was plagued with an idiotic feeling that the person telling the story was sitting at a desk writing it. Fatal! Also, I have quite a bit of introspection in my heroes, and to write all this in the first person makes them sound like nasty schemers, which of course they are, but they seem less so if some all-knowing author is telling what is going on in their heads.

Highsmith also preferred "two points of view in a novel, but I don't always have them". In most cases where she elected not to write from two (usually male) viewpoints, she chose a single (also usually male) viewpoint – for example Deep Water (1957), This Sweet Sickness (1960), The Tremor of Forgery (1969) and all bar one (Ripley's Game, 1974) of the five Tom Ripley novels, reasoning that "keeping a single point of view throughout a book... increases the intensity of the story – and intensity can and should offset a possible monotony of a one-person viewpoint". But very occasionally she wrote a book from more than two points of view. A Suspension of Mercy (alias The Story-Teller, 1965) would be an example of this, as would this book:

A Dog's Ransom, published in hardback in the UK by Heinemann in 1972. In the opening chapters the story unfolds from the viewpoint of Ed Reynolds, a well-to-do New Yorker on the receiving end of anonymous poison pen letters; but once Ed and his wife Greta's French poodle, Lisa, is dognapped,  Highsmith introduces Patrolman Clarence Duhamell, a well-meaning but naive and, so it proves, inept cop who makes it his personal mission to retrieve Lisa. And then, just as it looks as though Highsmith will be uncharacteristically withholding the identity of the dognapper and crafting a whodunnit – as she did in probably her weakest novel, A Game for the Living (1958) – she introduces her third POV character, one of her classic creeps, the objectionable Kenneth Rowajinski.

I suppose the prior Highsmith creep Rowajinski most reminded me of was Melchior Kimmel from The Blunderer (1954), but in his nasty hobby of poison penning, Rowajinski also brought to my mind Tom in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), who in the opening stages of that book is engaged in a spot of mail fraud – "no more than a practical joke, really," as Highsmith/Tom puts it, "Good clean sport" – and considering giving one of his victims "a good scare by telephone to put the fear of god into him". But anyway: the multiple vantage points of A Dog's Ransom and its vision of a New York crippled by crime and corruption afford the novel a kind of state-of-the-nation feel – which, according to Highsmith's biographer, Andrew Wilson (in Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, 2003), was precisely Highsmith's intention.

This and other aspects of the novel are explored by John Norris in his thoughtful review of A Dog's Ransom from last week (coincidentally both John and I happened to have read the same book at around the same time). I'm not sure if John actually liked the book – I'm not sure I did either – but he like me was certainly fascinated by it. Reviews at the time of publication were mixed, however; though Brigid Brophy in The Listener thought the novel "a virtuoso piece" and praised it for "taking the reader deep into the ironies of his own ambivalence", Mary Borg in the New Statesman highlighted the "glaring unlikeliness" of the plot, while the Times Literary Supplement called the book "a mechanical exercise in self-pastiche, employing all [Highsmith's] familiar devices and rehearsing most of her familiar obsessions, but with none of the vigour, inventiveness or intensity which in her best work makes those devices and obsessions seem so rivetting".

"Such reviews," wrote Andrew Wilson in Beautiful Shadow, "compelled Graham Greene to write to Highsmith expressing his disgust at the stupidity of the critics and admiration for the book itself, noting that it was 'one of the best and most complex of your novels'." Greene was a fan of Highsmith's work – as was she of his; he's one of the very few authors she namechecks in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction – and the two corresponded for years. Greene also provided the foreword to Highsmith's first collection of short stories, Eleven (alias The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories, 1970) – as quoted on the back of the Heinemann edition of A Dog's Ransom – and I'll be taking a look at that book in my next post.

Ripley's Game and The American Friend: the Films and the Book (by Patricia Highsmith)

To round off what's become quite a protracted run of posts on Patricia Highsmith – links to previous missives in the run can be found at the bottom of this post, should anyone be remotely interested – I thought I'd take a look at two different film adaptations of my favourite of Highsmith's novels – indeed my favourite novel full stop: the third Tom Ripley novel, Ripley's Game (1974). One of those film adaptations, the eponymous 2002 version, directed by Liliana Cavani, I've seen a few times over the years (and watched again recently); the other, Wim Wenders' The American Friend (1977), I only saw for the first time last week. To be honest I was in two minds as to whether or not to post anything about either of them – there are doubtless plenty of reviews already available online. But what there doesn't seem to be so much of is comparison between the two and to the source text, and so here, for what they're worth, are some notes and thoughts along those lines.

For a start, though derived from the same source and following essentially the same story, The American Friend and Ripley's Game are very different films – the former a, for want of a better term, arthouse film, the latter I guess an old school Euro-thriller, albeit one directed by ostensibly an arthouse director (Cavani's credits include 1974's The Night Porter). I suppose one illustration of this might be how each film handles the pivotal scene early on where Jonathan Trevanny – in the book and in Cavani's film; in Wenders' film he's Jonathan Zimmerman – unwittingly makes a nemesis of Tom Ripley. Cavani correctly locates this scene in Jonathan's kitchen during a party, but then embellishes it, depicting a drunken Jonathan – played by Dougray Scott – deriding Tom's lack of taste to a cabal of cackling cronies, only for Tom – John Malkovich – to overhear and icily challenge him. Wenders relocates the scene to an auction room, but has Bruno Ganz as Jonathan underplay the offhand slight in the same fashion as the novel: upon being introduced to Tom – played by Dennis Hopper – Jonathan ignores Tom's proffered hand and mutters, "Oh yes, I've heard of you."

On the commentary track on the DVD of The American Friend Wim Wenders remarks of this scene, "That's what I love about Patricia Highsmith, to invent a whole story out of such a little incident: a man's pride is hurt." It's clear that Wenders is something of a fan of Highsmith, but Ripley's Game wasn't his first choice of her novels to adapt. His favourite Highsmith novel was The Cry of the Owl (1962), but the film rights to that book weren't available – and nor were the rights to his second favourite Highsmith novel, The Tremor of Forgery (1969), or his third favourite, or fourth, and so on. Eventually he met Highsmith and she explained that the only novel of hers where the rights were still available was the one she had just finished, because no one else had read it yet. She then pulled the manuscript of Ripley's Game out of her bag.

Cavani was also a Highsmith fan prior to filming her version of the book – "I love Patricia Highsmith and have read most of her books," she told an audience at the Boston International Festival of Women's Film in 2003 – but unlike Wenders she didn't actively pursue a Highsmith novel herself; Ripley's Game was brought to her by producer Ileen Maisel. What Cavani isn't a fan of, however, is Wenders' film. She told the film critic Gerald Peary: "I saw the Wenders film when it came out, but I didn’t like it very much. I don’t think Wenders quite centred on what Highsmith meant. He’d almost fallen in love with this cowboy character. It’s a reflection of those years, the 1970s, German directors discovering American directors and writers."

Highsmith herself wasn't exactly enamoured of Dennis Hopper's Stetson-wearing Ripley either – at least not at first; after an initially adverse reaction to The American Friend she later wrote to Wenders and admitted that she'd been wrong, even to the extent that she thought Hopper had captured the essence of Ripley, the soul of the character. I can kind of see what she means in some scenes, especially the first encounter between Tom and Jonathan in the latter's picture-framing shop: for me that's where Hopper is closest to the Ripley of the page – his reserved nature, the way he smiles at Jonathan. It's no coincidence that that was actually the first scene Hopper shot in the film: in those early days of the production he was sticking closest to the Tom of the novel and of Wenders' original script; thereafter his performance became more improvisational, while Wenders for his part was rewriting daily, the two striving to reach the "truth" of the character as they saw him.

According to Liliana Cavani there was plenty of rewriting on Ripley's Game too – she worked extensively on the script with the screenwriter, Charles McKeown – but at least in terms of that script there was apparently no improvisation on the part of Malkovich. How much of his performance was down to the writing, the direction or his own choices I couldn't say, but certainly Tom's malevolence is brought to the fore, Malkovich casually issuing threats to all and sundry (something the Tom of the books would never do) and even at one point providing (to Jonathan) a pithy summary of his character as the filmmakers saw him: "I'm a creation. A gifted improviser. I lack your conscience and, when I was young, that troubled me. It no longer does. I don't worry about being caught because I don't think anyone is watching."

A creation... a gifted improviser... lack of conscience: all this sounds like the Tom of the books, but what is lacking in Malkovich's portrayal is Tom's unexpected gregariousness and warmth. In the Ripliad people genuinely seem to like Tom; in Ripley's Game (the film) only his wife does, although arguably Jonathan warms to him. It's hard to imagine anyone else doing so though – and almost as hard to imagine anyone warming to Dennis Hopper's Tom: a loner with a penchant for recording his own rambling thoughts on dictaphone and reel-to-reel, living in a dilapidated city mansion lit by neon signs and flickering TV screens. Though again Jonathan does warm to Tom, even more so than in Cavani's version.

On the commentary track for The American Friend Wenders notes that he originally thought of John Cassavetes for the role of Ripley, which would have been interesting. In the event Cassavetes passed and suggested Hopper instead – another film actor who also directed. And in fact Wenders cast a number of film actor-directors and directors in the movie, all of them playing ne'er-do-wells of one type or another. The French actor-director Gérard Blain plays Tom's criminal associate Raoul Minot (Reeves Minot in the Ripliad); Sam Fuller, of Shock Corridor fame, plays the gangster Jonathan is supposed to murder on the train (with Tom's assistance); and Nicholas Ray plays Derwatt, the painter-forger Tom is in league with.

Ripliad enthusiasts might raise an eyebrow at that last one, because Derwatt is actually a character from the previous Tom Ripley novel, Ripley Under Ground. He's not a forger in that novel either; he's a deceased painter who is forged by another painter, Bernard Tufts. I was a little surprised when I learned prior to watching The American Friend that Wenders had stapled some of the art forgery elements of Ripley Under Ground onto Ripley's Game – why would he do such a thing? – but his casting of his friend Nicholas Ray provides the explanation. Wenders reveals on the American Friend commentary track that Ray was dying – he finally passed away in 1979 – and that as a consequence Wenders wanted to get Ray into his film somehow. Unfortunately there was no part suitable for Ray, until Wenders thought of bringing Derwatt into the story.

Curiously, Cavani's Ripley's Game also introduces elements of art forgery: the film opens with Tom and Reeves – the latter played with sweary East End barrow-boy abandon by Ray Winstone, nothing like the Reeves of the books but immensely enjoyable nonetheless – selling forged paintings in Berlin, the funds from which Tom uses to buy a palatial villa in Italy – one which in truth is no closer to the more modest Belle Ombre of the books than Dennis Hopper's weird mansion in The American Friend. Jonathan lives in quite a nice gaff in the Ripley's Game film too, which on his wages I found slightly hard to believe, until I recalled how much some of the picture framers around Lewes charge.

Bruno Ganz's Jonathan, on the other hand, lives with his family adjacent to Hamburg's docks (like Cavani Wenders relocates the story from the novels' rural France) in a cramped apartment, one more befitting his evidently modest means. For me, Ganz gives the performance of either film. He's a more believable Jonathan than Dougray Scott for sure, but in his quiet and unassuming way he also outshines Dennis Hopper's chaotic turn in The American Friend and John Malkovich's dominating performance in Ripley's Game. I would say he's worth the price of admission alone, but The American Friend has much to recommend it besides, as does Ripley's Game, not least the aforementioned train sequence, which in both films is terrifically handled: thrilling, gruesome, darkly comic, and arresting in the moment, replicated in each film, where Jonathan tests the garrotte on himself. In general I don't think you could class either film as an especially faithful adaptation of the source material, but the gusto with which they both attack the same vital sequence speaks volumes to the passion of the filmmakers for their respective projects.

NB: German American Friend poster by Sickert filched from Mean Sheets.

Previous Patricia Highsmith posts in this run: 

Patricia Highsmith's Short Stories: Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, Signed Inscribed Association First Edition

Patricia Highsmith's Short Stories: The Black House, Signed Inscribed Association First Edition with Handwritten Letter

Donald E. Westlake on Patricia Highsmith and Ripley Under Ground (the Film)

A Suspension of Mercy: Book Review

Ripley's Game: 1989 Uniform Edition

Those Who Walk Away: Book Review

Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game: Heinemann Uniform Edition, 1989

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 13/6/14. 

Ripley's Game, Patricia Highsmith's sixteenth novel and the third book in her five-book Ripliad, is, I think, my favourite novel – not only of her novels – that I've read, which is quite a lot – but of all the novels that I've ever read. I wrote about the book at some length the year before last as part of the Great Tom Ripley Reread, and though I was relatively pleased with what I concocted at the time and for a little while after, on reflection I'm not sure I did the novel justice – and especially so in comparison to a series of articles on the book by John Mullan which I recently came across. Originally published in weekly instalments in The Guardian Review in 2003, Mullan's articles break the novel down into four themes – "the anti-hero", "split narratives", "the novel sequence" (i.e. the Ripliad as a whole), and "the setting" – and all are well worth reading for anyone with an interest in the novel, or Tom Ripley, or indeed Highsmith.

I stumbled upon the articles because I'd had my eye on a copy of the 1974 US Knopf hardback edition of Ripley's Game, offered by a UK seller on eBay (and AbeBooks), and was mulling purchasing it, at the same time idly googling the novel with half a mind to posting something on Existential Ennui if and when I did buy it. I already own the 1974 UK Heinemann hardback edition (a key book in my collection), which is in fact the true first edition – it published some months before the American one – but I'd not come across a copy of the US edition on this side of the pond before, and as it's in as short supply as the UK first (fewer than 20 copies in each case on AbeBooks), even though this copy was upwards of thirty quid – not exactly a fortune, but certainly not cheap enough for it to be an impulse purchase – I was quite tempted.

Then someone else went and bought the bloody thing and that was that. I stewed for a bit and briefly considered posting something about how I didn't manage to buy it in an illustration of the unjustifiable impulses, flights of fancy and bizarre sensations of forfeiture and loss which plague the inveterate collector, and so I could link those John Mullan articles, but in the end sanity prevailed – or at least what passes for sanity round these parts – and instead I did what anyone else in their right mind would have done under the circumstances: I went looking for an edition of Ripley's Game that was even scarcer than the 1974 Heinemann and Knopf editions. And I came up with this:

The 1989 reissue of the Heinemann edition, which is actually the third printing of the Heinemann hardback; the original edition was reprinted in the year of publication:

Now, a reissue may not sound terribly interesting or desirable, and maybe to most people it isn't; but to my mind this one is. For one thing there's that aforementioned scarcity: at present I can see just two copies of this edition for sale online, one of them ex-library. Then there's the design of the jacket and attendant jacket blurb, which is different to the 1974 one (both printings):

which bore a photograph on the front by Graham Miller and quite a bit more text overall. The 1989 edition strips back both the jacket text and design (which is uncredited), and in the choice of typeface and photo of a metal puzzle – a nail and a triangle intertwined like Tom Ripley and Jonathan Trevanny in the story – on the front, effectively matches the styling of Heinemann's Uniform Edition of Highsmith's novels, two of which, The Blunderer and The Talented Mr. Ripley – which were issued in the Uniform Edition in 1966 – I own (in later printings) and have blogged about:

However, the weight of the typeface in the title of Ripley's Game is lighter than that in the titles of other Highsmith Uniform Edition books, and there's no mention of this one being part of the Uniform Edition anywhere on the wrapper (and no price on the jacket flap either; I suspect the print run for this edition was small and most copies were destined for libraries and export). What there is a mention of is of two other Ripliad novels being reissued – presumably in the same style – at the same time: The Talented Mr. Ripley – which had already been issued by Heinemann a couple of times in the Uniform styling – and The Boy Who Followed Ripley, which was originally published by Heinemann in 1980.

Anyway, for me, being such a huge fan of Ripley's Game, this is a nice edition to own the novel in (as well as the Heinemann first edition), and I've added it to the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery under "Patriciaphernalia" down the bottom. And while I'm on the subject of Ripley's Game, I've also ordered The American Friend, Wim Wenders's 1977 film adaptation of the novel, on DVD, and plan to watch that and re-watch Liliana Cavani's 2002 adaptation, with a view to posting something on them both. However, my next Patricia Highsmith blog post will probably be on her 1967 novel Those Who Walk Away.

Donald E. Westlake on Patricia Highsmith and Ripley Under Ground (the Book and the Film)

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker.

Four years ago I posted a review of Ripley Under Ground, Roger Spottiswoode's 2005 film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's second Tom Ripley novel. Much as I love Highsmith's source text – indeed the Ripliad as a whole – I wasn't terribly keen on the film; the dreadfully miscast Barry Pepper's performance as Tom Ripley left a lot to be desired, and the way the filmmakers eviscerated Tom's character, excising his murderous background, for me fatally undermined the entire enterprise. I didn't blame anyone in particular for any of this, but I did make note of one of the people at least in part responsible: Donald E. Westlake.

Westlake is credited as co-writer of the screenplay for Ripley Under Ground – with William Blake Herron – but at that point I was only dimly aware of who Westlake was; I hadn't yet read anything by him, although I was just about to, namely The Hunter, alias Point Blank – the first Parker novel (written, of course, as Richard Stark), and the first of many Westlake books I would read over the ensuing years. One of the most recent being this:

The Getaway Car, the forthcoming (in September) Westlake non-fiction miscellany put together by Levi Stahl of the University of Chicago Press. Levi kindly arranged for me to be sent an uncorrected page proof of the book, which I've been dipping in and out of since it arrived the other week; I expect I'll review it in full nearer the pub date, but I was drawn in particular to a piece to do with Westlake's experiences on Ripley Under Ground – partly because Patricia Highsmith has been on my mind of late (I reviewed two inscribed copies of her short story collections recently, and have further posts on her planned), but also because it sheds a little light on what may have gone wrong with the film and on what Westlake made of Highsmith – i.e., what one of my favourite authors, responsible for one of the two most brilliant series of novels to feature a conscienceless criminal ever written, made of another of my favourite authors, responsible for the other most brilliant series of novels to feature a conscienceless criminal ever written (IMHO).

It's part of a longer piece titled "The Worst Happens", which comprises a selection of Westlake quotes from an interview by Patrick McGilligan (originally published in Sight and Sound in 1990 and then later expanded for Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s) in which Westlake expatiates on other writers' adaptations of his own work (The Hot Rock, The Outfit) and his own adaptations of other people's work (The Grifters). Westlake calls Ripley Under Ground – or rather "Mr. Ripley's Return" as the film was apparently known to Westlake – "one of the odder episodes", going on to recount how he "was delighted to take a crack at the book", and that his "first draft... attracted Michael Tolkin to direct... [who] had some lovely ideas, details of menace and suspense for the second draft, which I wrote, and then never heard from them again".

Over a decade later the film was made with no further involvement from Westlake (or indeed Tolkin), who had "no idea what happened to the script over the last eleven years" but who agreed to a shared credit in order to receive, on top of belated payment for his work, "a potential production bonus". This despite the fact that, as Westlake memorably puts it, "[n]o one [from the production] has contacted me directly. I am merely that truck-stop waitress in Amarillo they fucked in 1992. That's okay. I think highly of them, too. Someone working on the set of the movie—I think it was shot in France, but don't know for sure—said it wasn't coming out well, which could merely be schadenfreude."

As entertaining as all of this is, however, much more interesting to me are Westlake's thoughts on the source novel and on Highsmith herself:

I've always loved the deadpanness of Highsmith, and I thought it reached a peak in that book. The guy Ripley is tormenting, in his passive-aggressive way, suddenly turns around, smashes Ripley's head with a shovel, and buries him in Ripley's own garden. Ripley survives, comes up out of the grave later that night, takes a nice hot tub, patches his cut parts, and then what does he do? Call the cops? No. Shoot the guy? No. He haunts the guy for the next one hundred pages of the book, appearing and disappearing in windows, stuff like that.

I've long wondered whether Westlake read Highsmith – I mean beyond Ripley Under Ground, which for obvious reasons I figured he must have read at least – so it's nice to find that he did and that he loved her "deadpanness". I've yet to discover whether Highsmith read Westlake, but something I did learn was that almost certainly the two never met. Westlake told McGilligan: "I was delighted to take a crack at the book, and I didn't mind Highsmith's weirdness and repulsiveness, because I wasn't going to meet her or deal with her; that was the ground rule."

For me Highsmith's "weirdness and repulsiveness" are a big part of why her work appeals (let's not dwell on what that says about me), case in point being the next Highsmith book I'll be looking at: A Suspension of Mercy.

The Ripliad: Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley Series of Books Revisited and Rated

Having finally completed the Great Tom Ripley Reread (roughly seven months later than I figured I would, but hey, who's counting? Er, apart from me, evidently), I thought I'd take the opportunity to reflect on Patricia Highsmith's Ripley series as a whole, and revisit the Tom Ripley Quality Graph I proudly – perhaps foolishly, if the first comment on that post is anything to go by – unveiled back in 2011, with a view to seeing where each of the five Ripley novels now resides on it (innit). An absurdly self-indulgent and inconsequential exercise, I realise, but hey: when has that ever stopped me in the past?

First though, for any latecomers, in order of publication the five Tom Ripley novels are:

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)
Ripley Under Ground (1970)
Ripley's Game (1974)
The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980)
Ripley Under Water (1991)

If you're so inclined, and if you haven't done so already, you can click on each title to read my prolix Ripley Reread piffle – or you can simply take my word for it that those five blog posts are some of the most insightful and critically incisive essays ever written about Highsmith's Ripliad and leave it at that. Ahem. In any case, the Reread was certainly instructive as regards my relative appreciation of each Ripley novel: of the five books, only one remained unchanged in my estimations, and that was mostly because I rate it so highly – unlike some of the other novels in the Ripliad, I'd actually read it at least twice, possibly three times, before this latest Reread – it couldn't really rise any further. Although I suppose it could have fallen... which is what happened to one of the other Ripley novels, as we shall see.

Here's what the Tom Ripley Quality Graph looked like in 2011 (actually, not quite: I've redrawn it – the original was a bit scruffy – although the data is the same):

The Talented Mr. Ripley scored a very healthy 8 – it is, after all, the bedrock upon which the Ripliad is based – then the first sequel, Ripley Under Ground, scored an even healthier 9, and then the high water mark: Highsmith's masterpiece, Ripley's Game, with an unbeatable 10 – unbeatable, that is, if your graph only goes up to 10. Which mine does. Anyway, after that it's a steep decline to The Boy Who Followed Ripley on 7, and another drop to the final novel in the series, Ripley Under Water, on 6.

That was then. Now here's how things look in the wake of the Great Tom Ripley Reread:

Just one book has remained where it was: Ripley's Game, the Ripley novel par excellence. Or so I once believed, because its lofty position is now paralleled by the preceding Ripley book, Ripley Under Ground, which on this second go-through, and in its own way, I found just as compelling as Game. Talented has also moved up one – for me, more so even than Highsmith's 1950 (non-Ripley) debut, Strangers on a Train (and certainly more so than 1954's The Blunderer), it's the first book where her abiding concerns of power, identity, obsession, deception and the nature of evil fully coalesced – whereas the fourth Ripley novel, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, has fallen one place; on this read I found it lacked the urgency of others in the series (although as an aside, I should note that such is my enthusiasm for Ripley that Highsmith could have written an entire novel consisting of Tom gardening, playing the harpsichord and sauntering down the road to George and Marie's bar-tabac and I'd probably have been perfectly happy). Finally, Ripley Under Water – a direct sequel to Under Ground – went up one; on reflection I feel it is a better book than Boy, although still not as good as the first three Ripley novels.

So there you have it. For further thoughts on each book in the series I'll direct you to each of my five individual posts on them – assuming you've read the books, that is; if you haven't, well: you know what to do next. Suffice it to say in closing that to my mind Highsmith's Ripliad is a remarkable achievement: a peerless extended study of a man who literally gets away with murder – who is, as he himself puts it (in Ripley Under Ground), "a font of evil" – and how such a man might live with himself and even, by his own cunning, intellect, force of will and sense of self-preservation, flourish.

The Great Tom Ripley Reread, 5: Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith (London Limited Editions, Signed / Bloomsbury, 1991)

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 19/4/13.

And so the Great Tom Ripley Reread – which seemed like such a good idea when I embarked on it, ooh, over seven months ago – reaches the final novel in Patricia Highsmith's Ripliad: Ripley Under Water. And once again I have a very special edition of the book from which to springboard some musings:

This is the London Limited Editions, er, edition of Ripley Under Water, published in 1991 in conjunction with Bloomsbury, who published the regular UK first edition, with a dust jacket illustrated by Elspeth Ross, that same year. Bound in marbled cloth boards under a delicate glassine paper jacket – not shown, although my copy does have its wrapper – it was limited to just 150 copies, each one signed by Highsmith. Curiously, however, this one isn't numbered:

Even though the signature does appear to be genuine, so either the number got forgotten for this copy, or Highsmith ended up signing more than 150 of the buggers. I missed out on an eBay auction for another copy over a year ago – as a consolation prize bagging a terrific signed and inscribed first edition of Little Tales of Misogyny instead – so when this one popped up on eBay, I made damn sure I secured it (as it turned out for under half what the first copy went for). Anyone who's been following this series of posts will hopefully understand that for me, owning a signed Ripley novel is quite something, especially since the cheapest copy currently listed on AbeBooks is £135 (plus postage from America).

Although the four Ripley novels which follow The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) are, loosely speaking, sequels, most of them aren't sequels in the sense that they pick up on plot threads from previous books. The exception is this fifth and final entry in the series, which is a direct sequel to the second book, Ripley Under Ground (1970). Set five years on from that novel – in the mutable timeline of the Ripliad, that is, which means the presence in the narrative of slightly incongruous-for-1975 things like CDs and microwave ovens – it finds Tom besieged by an unhinged American couple, David and Janice Pritchard, who have moved into a house in the area of rural France in which Ripley resides. The Pritchards – David especially, but also Janice – are digging into the death of the art collector Thomas Murchison, who, you'll recall, Tom murdered in Under Ground in order to keep Murchison from revealing that Tom and his English cohorts Ed Banbury and Jeff Constant of the Buckmaster Gallery were up to their necks in an art forgery ring.

Having got wind of this from Cynthia Gradnor, the one-time girlfriend of the artist doing the forging, Bernard Tufts (standing in for the deceased Derwatt), David Pritchard is now seemingly intent on finding the corpse of Murchison, which Tom, enlisting the aid of the aforementioned Bernard (who also subsequently died), deposited in a local river. All of which is explained piecemeal by Highsmith for those who haven't read Under Ground, but even so, unlike that and the other Ripley sequels, with Under Water, it helps enormously here to have read the book it references.

Which isn't to say there aren't references to other parts of the Ripliad too. For instance, one of the methods David Pritchard employs to unsettle Tom is prank telephone calls from someone purporting to be Dickie Greenleaf, the first of Tom's multiple victims (killed, of course, in The Talented Mr. Ripley). Dickie is perhaps the only one of Tom's murders that he feels any kind of remorse for – "The beginning of his troubles", as Tom reflects after the first call: "The first man he had killed, and the only one he regretted killing, really, the only crime he was sorry about." Though he's certain that Dickie is in fact dead, that initial phone call makes Tom physically sick – an atypical response from the usually in-control Ripley.

The presence of an existential threat for Tom makes for a welcome change from the previous book in the series, The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), in which Tom's role was often quite passive. Highsmith's original idea for what would be her last Ripley novel (she died in 1995) was "Ripley touches madness" (jotted in one of her notebooks, as revealed in Andrew Wilson's 2003 biography Beautiful Shadow), and elements of that notion do make it through to the finished novel: when David Pritchard – or "Prickard", as Tom's wife, Heloise, repeatedly mispronounces it, causing Tom to drily correct her ("Pritchard, dear") – follows Tom and Heloise to Tangier, Ripley lures him to a coastal cafe and beats him up, only just keeping from killing him. By and large, though, Tom acts no more crazy than at any other point in the Ripliad, and considerably less so than in Ripley Under Ground, where he struggled to keep a grip on the freewheeling insanity he'd unleashed.

Of course, Tom is unhinged; at one point, in reference to Pritchard, he muses that he doesn't understand cracked people (the one exception being Bernard), when in fact he himself is by any definition, to put it mildly, highly abnormal: a conscienceless serial killer. Highsmith is performing her usual trick here of never deviating from Tom's viewpoint, so that we unwittingly empathize with him and Pritchard becomes the villain of the piece. In reality, they're as bad as each other; indeed, Pritchard nails Tom when he calls him a "snob crook".

There again, Tom does display some of his more admirable qualities in the book as well. His relationship with Heloise is never more touching than it is here: he twice tells her he loves her – an unusually forthright declaration from the normally reticent Ripley – and a postcard from her makes "his heart jump". (The only hint of his latent homosexuality this time comes courtesy of his reading a biography of Oscar Wilde – in the previous book he was reading Christopher Isherwood – but even there, that was the book Highsmith herself was reading whilst writing Under Water.) Meanwhile, his loyalty to Ed and Jeff, and theirs to him, seems to go beyond simple self-preservation; when Ed volunteers to come over to France to help thwart Pritchard's "anti-Ripley game" (nicely done, Ms. Highsmith), he apparently does so out of genuine friendship.

Still, let's not get too carried away. Ripley is still, as Cynthia Gradnor puts it, "the most evil man I've ever met", adding: "if you consider that a favourable distinction. You probably do." He does some pretty despicable things in Ripley Under Water, not least of which being his gruesome "autopsy" of Murchison's remains when they're delivered by David Pritchard to his house, freshly recovered from the river, complete with "bits of flesh... pale and flabby, [stuck] to the spinal column" – a scene which recalls the similar desecration of Bernard Tufts' corpse in Under Ground. As for Tom's opportunistic solution to the Pritchards' meddling, in its own way that's as cold and calculating as any other of his actions across the Ripliad.

Unexpectedly, I found myself enjoying Ripley Under Water a lot more than I thought I would on this second go-round. I'd previously viewed it as the weakest instalment in the Ripliad, but it actually went up in my estimations; I think I'd put it somewhere just above The Boy Who Followed Ripley on my Tom Ripley Graph now. In fact, having (finally) completed the Great Tom Ripley Reread, I'm of a mind to revisit that graph to see where each of the five Ripley novels now rests on it...

The Great Tom Ripley Reread, 4: The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1980)

NB: This is the somewhat belated fourth instalment in the Great Tom Ripley Reread, which, as the overarching title suggests, entails me rereading, and then blogging about (in a prolix and frankly disturbingly gushing fashion), each of the five Patricia Highsmith novels to feature Tom Ripley, the man with no conscience.

Featured in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

Of all the characters Patricia Highsmith created, Tom Ripley was the one she most identified with. After The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) she returned to him four times – the only one of her leads to be granted a sequel, let alone four of the buggers – and each time there seemed to be more of Highsmith herself visible in the characterization of Ripley. Whether it be Tom's frustration at the haphazard nature of the telephone service in France, where Highsmith lived in the 1970s (Ripley Under Ground, 1970; Ripley's Game, 1974), his thoughts on spy novels, or indeed his politics (both Ripley's Game), his opinions are often seemingly simpatico with hers. And so it proves again in the fourth novel in the Ripliad: when Tom mithers about having to do his accounts in The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980; UK Heinemann first edition, Bill Richmond cover, seen above) or has a pop at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (comparing it to a blow-up doll), the passages could have been lifted directly from Highsmith's own diaries or notebooks.

Which is, in effect, what happened for the segment of the book set in West Berlin, where Tom travels with Frank Pierson, the sixteen-year-old American heir to a fortune who has latched on to (and who idolises) him. According to Andrew Wilson's 2003 biography of Highsmith, Beautiful Shadow, Highsmith travelled to Berlin expressly in order to research her fourth Ripley outing, eventually reworking her own excursions, which she documented in her notebook, for the novel. After initially being confused by Berlin, over repeated trips Highsmith had become fascinated by the city, a fascination that's almost tangible in The Boy Who Followed Ripley: even during my first reading of the novel the Berlin section felt by far the most alive of the book, and that remained the case for my second go-through.

What the rest of the novel lacks is any real sense of existential danger for Tom. Where in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground and even, to an extent, Ripley's Game, Tom had to fight for his very survival – which is to say his liberty and his idle, comfortable way of life (in Ripley's Game, his own actions lead directly to an assault on his rural French home, Belle Ombre) – in The Boy Who Followed Ripley (which, in the mutable timeline of the Ripliad, is set roughly six months on from Game), the Berlin escapade aside (I'll return to that shortly), he's preoccupied for the most part with saving Frank from himself. The teenager tracks Tom down in France having heard of him thanks to a Derwatt painting (actually a Bernard Tufts fake) Frank's father owns (see Ripley Under Ground for the story behind Derwatt/Tufts). Tom soon learns that Frank's father, who was confined to a wheelchair, was killed when he fell from a cliff behind the family mansion just before Frank fled America, and that furthermore, Frank believes he was responsible.

What Highsmith is setting up here is yet another spin on her familiar theme of two men becoming strangely fascinated by and fixated on one another. The problem is that in this instance, it's a passive relationship for both parties. What made previous takes on the theme so compelling was the manipulative, malicious – and ultimately murderous – nature of at least one of the protagonists, whether it be Bruno in Highsmith's debut, Strangers on a Train (1950), or indeed Tom himself in Talented, Under Ground and Game. Here, however, Frank – despite apparently offing his father – is utterly guileless, while Tom takes on the guise almost of a mother hen – or, perhaps more accurately given the gay undercurrent of the relationship, a bear to Frank's cub.

Because although the twisted, violent impulses inherent in so many of Highsmith's male-on-male (as it were) dynamics are missing here, the subtext of homosexuality that's also often present – not least in the Ripley novels – is brought to the fore. The question of Tom's sexuality (or lack thereof) is a constant background buzz in the Ripliad; in The Talented Mr. Ripley it was evident that he was in love with Dickie Greenleaf (or at least the idea of Dickie), and his marriage to Heloise thereafter is, if not entirely sexless, then devoid of any noticeable passion. For her part, Highsmith always denied Tom was gay, although latterly she did acknowledge that he might have been suppressing homosexual tendencies. But in The Boy Who Followed Ripley, she addresses the question more directly than at any other point in the series.

Early on, when Antoine Grais, a friend of Heloise's, arrives at Belle Ombre unexpectedly, Tom – who we're explicitly informed is reading Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind – tells Frank to go upstairs in order to avoid awkward questions. Antoine catches a glimpse of Frank, apologisies for disturbing Tom, and then, with "a nasty curiosity", asks if his "friend" is male or female. "Guess," Tom replies. Frank clearly arouses in Tom a protective passion that's usually reserved for those times when he's engaged in deadly acts of self-preservation; when Frank admits to Tom that he killed his own father, uncharacteristically Tom grabs Frank by the throat and shakes him to dissuade him from running off. Not long after, Frank hides from Tom in the woods behind Belle Ombre as a kind of test; when Frank appears from behind a tree, Tom feels "relief, like an ache".

That episode is echoed by another once the action moves to Berlin, where Tom takes Frank on an impulse. Having spent an evening with Frank in a gay bar (where else?), the next day the two are walking in the woods at the edge of the city when Frank is kidnapped. Tom is shaken by this turn of events, "thoroughly shattered by the boy's – rape, in the sense that he had been snatched away". Subsequently, in order to retrieve Frank, Tom dons full drag, ostensibly as a disguise so he can follow the kidnappers who are holding Frank to ransom. Fully made-up, wearing a wig and dressed in a "very pretty" pink, white and transparent gown, Tom takes to the dancefloor of a gay club as he waits for the kidnappers, feeling "exhilarated and stronger", delighting in the freedom his disguise affords him.

Of course, this isn't the first time Tom has disguised himself: in Ripley Under Ground he assumed the identity of the painter, Derwatt, donning a fake beard and applying makeup, and his rescue of Frank – which he accomplishes still dressed as a woman – recalls some of the giddy, freewheeling insanity of that novel. And there are other nods to Under Ground besides, as well as to Ripley's Game: Ed and Jeff from the Buckmaster Gallery are mentioned, as is Murchison, the art collector whom Tom bludgeoned with a bottle of red; Tom is taking lessons for the hapsichord he bought in Game; and Tom's friend, the fence Reeves Minot, features again, along with a couple of fresh faces, two Berlin associates of Reeves's, Eric and Peter, who regard the legendary, unpredictable, mercurial – and, yes, courageous – Tom Ripley with something approaching awe.

In the end, the sexual aspect of Tom and Frank's relationship is less important than the psychological one. Because at root the book is a study of a conscienceless man who wonders if he's perhaps found a kindred spirit: a killer, like himself; not quite on the same scale – just the one murder to Tom's "seven or eight" – but even so, someone he can guide, "steer", maybe even mould. That Tom is mistaken provides the tragedy in the tale; for Tom Ripley, the "font of evil" (as he so memorably puts it in Ripley Under Ground), can never truly be anyone's saviour – quite the opposite, in fact, as the gauche American couple who decide to stick their noses into the Murchison affair in the final book in the Ripliad, Ripley Under Water, discover to their cost...

Harriet Lane, Alys, Always (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012; Signed Edition), Patricia Highsmith, and Tom Ripley

As with C. J. Sansom's Dominion, I became interested in this next book as a result of reading a few reviews at the tail end of last year:

Alys, Always by Harriet Lane, published in hardback – under a lovely dust jacket designed by Carrie May – by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in February 2012 – which, if you're paying attention at the back of the class, might beg the question, how come I only read those aforementioned reviews at the end of 2012...? Although if you're sitting at the front of the class with the rest of the exceptionally bright children, you'll probably already have worked out that it wasn't the reviews of the hardback edition that I noticed but the reviews of the paperback edition, which was published by Phoenix in December (tick, VG, clever kids; dullards at the back see me after). Of course, awkward bugger that I am, the paperback wasn't good enough for me – and neither was the regular hardback first edition. No – I decided that nothing less than a signed first edition would do, and so went and bought the only one I could find for sale online:

Which has been signed and dated pre-publication. And I suspect in years to come it'll be one to treasure; Lane's debut novel, Alys, Always has been rapturously received by critics, more than a few of whom have pointed to Patricia Highsmith as an influence, especially Highsmith's Tom Ripley novels – which was why my curiosity was piqued by those reviews I saw. Turns out Lane is indeed a fan of Highsmith's work – all the best people are, I find – and there are certainly echoes of The Talented Mr. Ripley in particular in Alys, Always. Not so much stylistically – the novel is written in the first person, present tense (where Highsmith stuck rigidly to third and past), and Lane is a lighter writer (hey!) than Highsmith – more in the way it centres on a manipulative type inveigling themselves into an unsuspecting circle of family and friends. In Talented it was Tom inserting himself into, and eventually co-opting, Dickie Greenleaf's life; here it's Frances Thorpe – thirty-something subeditor on the literary section of an ailing newspaper – worming her way into the lives of novelist Laurence Kyte and his children.

One major difference is that unlike Tom Ripley, Frances doesn't actually kill anyone. Instead, at the novel's outset she chances upon the crashed car of Laurence's wife, Alys, who, after a brief, strained conversation, promptly dies on her. Even so, it's the kind of opening one can imagine Highsmith herself entertaining: a coincidence (she was very fond of those) that sets in motion a chain of events largely driven by a scheming loner. For though Frances may not share Tom's murderous tendencies, she does share his outsider's viewpoint, observing the Kytes – not to mention her own family and friends – at a step removed, which in turn allows her to shape and mould their emotions and intuit and almost predict their reactions. She also shares Tom's ultimate aim – a better life for him/herself – and even, in a parallel of the scene in Talented where Tom tries on Dickie's things, drifts about the Kytes' holiday home draped in Alys's shawl and pores over her cookbooks and photo albums.

I don't mean to bang on about Patricia Highsmith – even though I, er, kind of have – but the more you look at Alys, Always, the more Highsmith comes to mind – or at least, to my mind. It's important to note, however, that this isn't imitation on Lane's part: it's inspiration. Lane has a style all her own; she's especially good at evoking an environment in a few lines, and I particularly admire her brevity (the novel clocks in at just over 200 pages, which, in an era of bloated doorstoppers, is refreshing). My learned friend Book Glutton put it best: he identified Alys, Always as being "Highsmithic" – and to my way of thinking, there's no higher praise than that.