Signed Inscribed Tom Ripley Books: Patricia Highsmith's Ripley Under Ground and The Boy Who Followed Ripley

I'm of a mind to post some of the signed books I've acquired over the past year or two – at least, I'm of a mind as I type this; whether or not I'll remain of a mind to do so, or indeed retain any enthusiasm for blogging whatsoever, remains to be seen. For now, though, here's a pair of signed Patricia Highsmith books, both of which are novels in my abiding obsession, the Tom Ripley series.

On the left is a 1970 US Doubleday Book Club Edition of Ripley Under Ground, the second novel in the five-book Ripliad, and on the right a 1980 US Lippincott & Crowell first edition of The Boy Who Followed Ripley, the fourth novel in the Ripliad. The dust jacket design on Ripley Under Ground is by Alex Gotfryd, while the dust jacket design on The Boy Who Followed Ripley is by Pat Voehl.

Ripley Under Ground has been signed, inscribed ("Best to you") and dated (19 May 1981) by Patricia Highsmith on the half-title page – in pencil, unusually (every other signed Highsmith book I own – a dozen in total – has been signed in pen). As noted, it's a book club edition, which ordinarily would make it less interesting to me, but it's the only signed copy of Ripley Under Ground – not just one of my favourite novels in the Ripliad but one of my favourite Highsmiths, and therefore one of my favourite novels, full stop – in any edition I've ever come across, so it's a remarkable thing indeed.

The Boy Who Followed Ripley is an association copy, signed by Highsmith on the front free endpaper and inscribed to Lou Kannenstine – or rather "Kannenstein", as Highmith has misspelled it. Kannenstine, who died in 2014, was the publisher of Foul Play Press, an imprint of Countryman Press which issued crime and mystery novels by, among others, Reginald Hill, Max Allan Collins and another abiding preoccupation of mine, Donald E. Westlake (the three Grofield novels written as Richard Stark).

I've added both books to the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery (under 'Patriciaphernalia'), where my inscribed association copy of the fifth Ripley novel, Ripley Under Water, also resides – meaning I now own three-fifths of the Ripliad in signed editions (two copies in the case of Ripley Under Water). And if the mood takes me, I'll be posting some other signed Highsmiths soon.

A Tom Ripley and Ripliad Chronology: a Timeline in Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (Virago, 2015)

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 7/8/15.

When a series of novels – especially a series published over an extended period and featuring the same lead character throughout – evolves in the mind of the reader from being merely a diversion or, at the upper end of the scale of interest, a fascination, to becoming a full-blown obsession, the minutiae of the fictional world being depicted starts to assume more of an importance than it perhaps otherwise would (or should). Take a particular passion of mine: the five Patricia Highsmith novels starring Tom Ripley – the Ripliad. Aspects of Tom's world to which I've devoted more thought than is entirely necessary (or healthy) include Tom's politics (leftish, for the most part), the social scene around his home in Villeperce-sur-Seine (agreeable, for the most part, although also snobbish) and the state of Tom's garden at Belle Ombre (a curious one that, when I struggle to summon much interest in my own garden beyond a desire to sit in it on occasion). But probably the facet of the Ripliad I've pondered most frequently is its chronology.

In publishing terms, Highsmith's intermittent series spans thirty-six years, from 1955's The Talented Mr. Ripley to 1991's Ripley Under Water, and the world depicted in each novel reflects the era in which it was written, from the 1950s mise-en-scene of Tom's debut to the presence of CDs and microwave ovens in his swansong. But in the internal chronology of the series, little more than a decade elapses between The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ripley Under Water. We're told in the the novels that Tom is twenty-five years old at the time of Talented; that he's thirty-one in the second instalment in the Ripliad, 1970's Ripley Under Ground; and that the events of Ripley Under Water take place about five years on from Under Ground – which, if Talented is indeed set in 1955, would mean that Under Water is set in 1966. And yet the world outside Belle Ombre's windows marches on through the 1970s and into the early 1990s.

Fellow Ripley enthusiast Craig D noted in the comments to my Tom Ripley Reread post on Ripley Under Ground that he "once read an interview with Highsmith in which she... jokingly [said] that she 'cheated' with the timeline", so I suppose one really shouldn't read too much into the mutable nature of the Ripliad chronology. But of course that doesn't prevent unhinged individuals like myself from dwelling on it – and nor does it stop other folk from offering their own interpretations of it.

One such recent one, the most detailed I've come across – it proffers season as well as year for when each novel is set, plus locales – appears in the 2015 Virago hardback edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley (a copy of which was kindly sent to me by Virago's Editorial Director Donna Coonan, to whom I can only apologise for the ridiculously nitpicky nature of what follows), appended to John Sutherland's new introduction to the novel. On one level it's an entirely reasonable piece of work: each of the dates it gives is informed by the surroundings in each novel – which, as I've noted, reflect the period in which each novel was written – and certainly in the case of Ripley Under Ground and 1974's Ripley's Game, the chronology further reflects the info Highsmith imparts in the latter: that just six months elapse between those two books.

Where the chronology starts to become problematic – at least for a lunatic like me – is in the concrete dates it gives for the four novels post-Talented (which the chronology maintains is "set in early 1955", which is fair enough). For Ripley Under Ground and Ripley's Game, the settings are given as, respectively, "summer 1968" and "late 1968 and early 1969", which tallies roughly with when the novels were written but would make Tom around thirty-eight, as opposed to the thirty-one he says he is. The fourth book in the Ripliad, 1980's The Boy Who Followed Ripley, I don't believe offers any indication of how long after Ripley's Game it's set (I could be wrong; it's two years since I last reread it), but the chronology states it's "set in summer and early autumn 1978", which would make Tom about forty-eight – markedly older than the novel seems to suggest he is. Lastly, the date for Ripley Under Water is stated as "summer and autumn 1988"; that would make Tom an unlikely fifty-eight and mean that thirty-three years have elapsed since the events of Talented.

There's no easy answer to this: Highsmith evidently did cheat, so it's impossible to reconcile the setting and surroundings of each novel with Tom's age in each. But by affixing such (relatively) firm dates to each book, the new chronology practically invites the scrutiny of those of us for whom the Ripliad has become, let's say, an abiding preoccupation.

Still, for the vast majority of the readership, who I imagine tend not to dwell on such things – which is to say they have a firmer grasp on reality and more of a sense of perspective than I seem to – the chronology will doubtless prove to be little more than a momentary diversion. And at least it's not as problematic as the year the otherwise learned Professor Sutherland calculates in his introduction for Tom's birth: 1934. Now how on earth did he arrive at that conclusion...?

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.

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, 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...

The Tom Ripley Novels: The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith (Chancellor Press Hardback, 1994)

This, it turns out, will be the final post in Patricia Highsmith Week; I do have one other fairly recent Highsmith acquisition, a short story collection, but I haven't read it yet, and I think I'd struggle to say anything about its background or cover design, chiefly because there's no design credit on the dustjacket and, well – I haven't read it yet. So instead let's round things off with this:

This is a UK hardback omnibus of four of the five Tom Ripley novels, published by Chancellor Press in 1994. The only one excluded is the final book, Ripley Under Water, although I'm not sure why that is; that novel, the last of Highsmith's works to be published in her lifetime (she had one final book, Small g: A Summer Idyll, published posthumously in 1995), debuted in 1991 (at least in Britain; in the States it didn't appear until the following year), so it could've easily made it in. In any case, there have been a handful of omnibus editions of the Ripley stories over the years, but most of them only contain three of the novels; the only one that doesn't is the 1992 Penguin edition, which contains the same stories as the Chancellor Press hardback. That Penguin collection, however, is a paperback, so for my money, the Chancellor Press omnibus is the best bet if you fancy a great big wedge of Ripley.

The cover design is by Button Design Co, but the illustration is by Mark Taylor, who I've blogged about before: he created the cover illos for the UK first editions of Elmore Leonard's two (so far; Leonard's working on another) Raylan Givens novels, Pronto and Riding the Rap. As to why I acquired this omnibus when I already own copies of all of the Tom Ripley novels... y'know, I'm not entirely sure. I think I was just intrigued by it when I saw it online and fancied having a look at it (and blogging about it, obviously). I suspect I'll release it into the wilds of Lewes's charity shops once I'm done with this post (so keep 'em peeled, fellow Lewesians), but it does at least give me the opportunity to write about Ripley again, something I never tire of doing.

See, I love Tom Ripley. I love Ripley as a character, and I love the books in which he appears. The best of the five novels, at least in my opinion, is 1974's Ripley's Game, but they all have their merits, and anyone thinking of reading them should put no stock in the received wisdom that the first one, 1955's The Talented Mr. Ripley, is the best one and that it's a law of diminishing returns thereafter. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if I were to rate each of the novels out of 10, and then chart them on a graph, that graph would look something like this:

You'll see there that we start fairly high with The Talented Mr. Ripley – it is, after all, a fine novel – then move up a notch for 1970's Ripley Under Ground; hit the high water mark with 1974's Ripley's Game; and then there's a fairly steep decline towards 1980's The Boy Who Followed Ripley and 1991's Ripley Under Water, although those last two still sit at 7/10 and 6/10 respectively. I realise this won't tally with everyone's assessment of the Ripley novels, but if you approach them with an open mind, I think you'll find that Tom is at his very best – most fascinating, most bizarre, most compelling – in Ripley Under Ground and Ripley's Game, and that, structurally, and in terms of story and the moral quandaries at its heart, Ripley's Game is the Ripley novel supreme.

There's so much to explore and discuss with the Ripley novels. For me, Tom becomes more interesting once he's ensconced in rural France as of Ripley Under Ground, having achieved his goal of a comfortable, cultured existence, and yet still drawn to the dark. Looked at as a part of Highsmith's wider body of work, it's notable that her familiar device of having two male protagonists becoming unhealthily fascinated by and intertwined with one another is also present in the Ripley novels, with the possible exception of Ripley Under Ground; indeed Ripley's Game could be said to be the ultimate expression of this, dividing its time between Tom and the hapless Jonathan Trevanny. And then there's Tom himself, about whom one could sermonise – or possibly evangelise, or perhaps even rhapsodise – endlessly, from the dichotomy of his manipulative nature versus his unexpected loyalty and bravery, to his eventual body count throughout the books (not as great, nor always as indefensible, as you might think).

In fact, there's so much to examine, scrutinise and mull over with the Ripley novels that one could write a whole series of posts on each of the books. So that's precisely what I will be doing before too long, taking each book in turn and really digging into them to identify themes and try and work out exactly who Tom Ripley is. That's for the future, however; for now I'm afraid that's all from Patricia Highsmith... and indeed that's nearly all from me, because Existential Ennui will be going on its summer holidays for a week or so. But I do have one last post for you before I depart, a little tease of things to come on this blog, plus a bit of housekeeping. Look out for that over the weekend... 

UPDATE, 22/4/13: Unusually for me, I actually made good on my promise and reread each of the five Ripley novels, after which I revisited the Tom Ripley Graph; the results can be found here.

The Ripley Collection

So, I now have first editions of all the Ripley sequels. The final one, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, turned up yesterday, a really lovely Heinemann first edition purchased via AbeBooks for very little indeed. AbeBooks is quite the resource – it's an aggregate of online booksellers, and pretty much any book you care to name is on there. Anyway, here are those covers in full:

And not forgetting my Pan paperback edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley: