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.

A Ripley's Game Reprise: 1974 US Knopf First Edition of Patricia Highsmith's Third Tom Ripley Novel

What scant posts there have been on here of late have been to do with comics – those are, after all, what have been preoccupying me both personally and professionally over the past year or so – but I have been picking up the odd book here and there too, and among those have been a number by another perennial preoccupation of mine, Patricia Highsmith. Just the other day I came into possession of this:

An American first edition of Ripley's Game, published by Knopf in 1974, dust jacket design by Janet Halverson (whose other jackets include the 1970 and 1978 US firsts of Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt and The Human Factor, and the 1981 US first of Ross Thomas's The Mordida Man). You may recall... actually at this point I doubt anyone recalls anything I've written on Existential Ennui, but anyway: Ripley's Game, the third book in the Ripliad (soon to become a TV show, with Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley – intriguing and encouraging casting there), is not only my favourite Highsmith novel, but my favourite novel full stop, and it was the acquisition of a 1974 Heinemann first a dozen years ago (in a long-since-vanished Cecil Court bookshop) that first got me into book collecting. As such, it's a totemic book for me.

I had my eye on a Knopf first six years ago, but it slipped through my fingers (as compensation I settled instead for a 1989 Heinemann Uniform Edition). The notion of getting my filthy mitts on a Knopf (ooer) has floated in and out of my head ever since then, but just the other day it seemed the fates had finally aligned when I was in Lewes's Bow Windows Bookshop and co-proprietor (and friend of mine) Ric mentioned he'd come into possession of one as part of a box of books – mostly crime fiction and spy fiction – he'd bought from a local. Or at least he thought he had: when we looked in said box, there was no sign of Ripley's Game. Bugger.

I'd pretty much resigned myself to the fact that once again the Knopf first had eluded my grasp when two days later Ric sent me a message saying he'd found it. And it turned out that not only was it a first edition (not a later printing – the Knopf edition went through a few), but it was once owned by local author John Pearson, he of James Bond: The Authorized Biography and The Life of Ian Fleming fame.

So I'm very happy with my copy (even though the dust jacket is a little battered: the sign of a well-read book, whether by Mr. Pearson or whoever it was Ric bought it off – and quite right too), not least because it affords me the opportunity to compare the US and UK first editions. The text in the Knopf edition, which was published in May of '74, a few months after the Heinemann edition, has been Americanised, or I suppose – depending on whether Highsmith, who was American, wrote the manuscript in American English – re-Americanised: within the first few sentences, there's a "parlor game" as opposed to "parlour game" in the Heinemann edition.

The Knopf has deckled edges, as is often the case with American editions, and a red-stained top block. I also rather like the jacket flap description of Tom Ripley as "energetic, amoral, overcivilized" and "undersensitized".

Now I suppose I'll have to write something abut the other Highsmith books I've picked up – especially as they're all signed.

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.

Patricia Highsmith on Writing, in Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense & Spy Fiction and Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books by H. R. F. Keating

By far the most sustained piece of writing by Patricia Highsmith on the subject of fiction – her own and others' – can be found in her 160-page (in its 1981 revised edition) guidebook Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (orig. 1966). But Highsmith did pen the occasional piece for other publications too, both magazines (Plotting itself grew out of an article Highsmith wrote for The Writer magazine, and in 1989 she wrote an article for Granta magazine on the subject of Tom Ripley) and books (the 1990 Bloomsbury edition of Carol includes an afterword on the genesis of that novel). In the 1980s she twice contributed to books edited and written by the crime writer and critic H. R. F. Keating – Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense & Spy Fiction (Windward, 1982) and Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books (Xanadu, 1987) – and both pieces are well worth a look.

Her piece for Whodunit, "Not-Thinking with the Dishes" in the "How I Write My Books" chapter, isn't very long – barely a page in length – but it's still revealing as regards her methods. Noting that she had "no set of rules for writing a book" and that she "never think[s] about who my readers may be", she states: "My book ideas begin with a situation of surprise or coincidence, some unusual circumstance, and around this, and forward and backward, I create a narrative with a beginning and an end." She continues:

I like to write three or four hours a day, taking a break frequently to do something such as finishing the last dishes in the sink, during which I am not-thinking about my work in progress. It is important that nobody else be in the house. Then my thoughts take a creative jump. Hard thought never did me very much good. I believe in letting one's mind alone. The only price I pay is having to rewrite, but not always a lot and mostly it is polishing, and having to cut a fair amount.

To illustrate this last point, Whodunit? reproduces a manuscript page from People Who Knock on the Door, which at that juncture hadn't been published (it was published by Heinemann the following year). Highsmith additionally reveals that she could write up to two thousand words a day, worked seven days a week ("In principle... something always happens to prevent work one or two days a week") and that she was unable to "adopt the method of a famous writer who said he writes the action parts first and fills in the gaps later" but instead had to "write all the in-between material as I go". She reasons: "Maybe this is inevitable because of the subjective attitude I generally take: I describe what is in the head of the protagonist, psychopath or not, because what is in his or her head must explain as well as advance the story."

Whodunit? itself is a thoroughly worthwhile book – there are essays by, among others, Michael Gilbert, John Gardner ("The Espionage Novel"), Gregory Mcdonald, Len Deighton and Eric Ambler, as well as writer-by-writer and character-by-character guides to crime fiction and thrillers – as is Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books, in which H. R. F. Keating offers a hundred two-page essays on key crime novels and their authors (the list can be found at Classic Crime Fiction). Highsmith penned the foreword to the book, in which she appears to demonstrate more of a working knowledge of the field than she suggested she had in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (she maintained in that book that she "seldom read" other people's crime novels). She singles out, among others, Wilkie Collins, Raymond Chandler, P. D. James, Cornell Woolrich, Georges Simenon and, especially gratifyingly for me, P. M. Hubbard (albeit only in passing), and picks over Keating's musings on these and other authors.

"One can open The 100 Best anywhere," Highsmith writes at the close of her foreword, "and be entertained by its contents, learn something new, or reinforce what is already in one's head." Not least in regard to Highsmith herself: Keating includes both The Tremor of Forgery (1969) – highlighting the "uneasiness" and "Fuzziness, ambiguity" of Highsmith's writing and "the to-and-fro indecisiveness of real life" she captures – and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), where he details the traits which make Tom Ripley such a compelling and, yes, charming character – "his genuine love of art and his true appreciation of the fruits of the earth... the simple affection he feels for his friends... his real interest in the earth-loving pursuit of gardening" and our "awed admiration" at "his willingness to take risks". He also recalls "a meeting of the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger award where one of our number announced that if we chose Ripley's Game for the prize she would resign".

Both Whodunit? and Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books are fairly readily – and cheaply – available (I found both for a few quid each in Colin Page Antiquarian Books in Brighton – where there is also, at time of writing, an expanded selection of secondhand crime fiction – a recently acquired collection, one which, needless to say, I've already raided). Not so the next Patricia Highsmith book I'll be blogging about: a signed association copy of the final novel in the Ripliad.

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...?

Patricia Highsmith, Sour Tales for Sweethearts, and The Talented Mr. Ripley (Virago, 2015)

I've managed to put together a – I think – pretty decent collection of signed and inscribed Patricia Highsmith books over the past few years – eight books in total, three of which I've yet to unveil on Existential Ennui (they're coming, I promise). But the very first signed/inscribed Highsmith book that I bought still holds a special place in my affections: a 1977 Heinemann first edition of Little Tales of Misogyny. In small part that's down to what a bargain the thing was – it only set me back a fiver – but mostly it's the nature of Highsmith's inscription on the front endpaper: a warm expression of "New Year's greetings" to two friends, featuring a little drawing of a glass of fizz and a description of the book as "sour reading – for sweet spirits".

That copy of Little Tales of Misogyny was my inspiration to collect further signed and inscribed Highsmith books, but little did I know when I blogged about it and its inscription three years ago that it would also prove inspirational – in an admittedly minor capacity – in the creation of a Highsmith publication itself; this one:

Sour Tales for Sweethearts, a 32-page pamphlet published by Virago in January of this year. Virago acquired the rights to Highsmith's backlist in the UK in 2013, and have been steadily reissuing her works as e-books and paperbacks – and, in one instance, hardback – ever since, all with rather nice playfully typographical covers. When it came to reissuing Little Tales of Misogyny at the start of this year, to accompany it Virago concocted Sour Tales for Sweethearts, a showcase-cum-promotional item intended to sit beside bookshop tills, featuring four stories from Little Tales of Misogyny: "The Hand" (the gruesome, blackly comic scene-setting opener to Little Tales of Misogyny), "The Invalid, or, The Bed-Ridden", "The Fully-Licensed Whore" and "The Female Novelist" (that last one an unusual entry in Highsmith's canon, in that it's written in the present tense).

I noticed listings for Sour Tales for Sweethearts popping up on eBay a few months back (I tend to keep a close eye on listings for Highsmith books on eBay), and wondered at the time what it was. Its title also rang a vague bell, although I must admit that at that point I didn't quite comprehend why. It was only more recently, a couple of weeks ago in fact, that I made the connection – or rather, the connection was made for me: the title of Sour Tales for Sweethearts was directly inspired by Patricia Highsmith's inscription "sour reading – for sweet spirits" in my copy of Little Tales of Misogyny.

This I learned from Virago's Editorial Director, Donna Coonan, who emailed me to share some very kind words about Existential Ennui in general and my multitudinous Patricia Highsmith posts in particular, which Donna had come across during her research into Highsmith whilst acquiring the author's rights. Following our email exchange, Donna sent me a copy of Sour Tales for Sweethearts, along with a copy of Virago's new hardback edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley, which boasts a fetching case sporting a design by textile designer Marian Mahler and a fine introduction by critic, academic, Ripliad enthusiast and Highsmith aficionado John Sutherland.

It also boasts something I don't believe I've come across before: a Tom Ripley chronology, giving fairly specific dates – season as well as year – for when each of the five Tom Ripley novels is set. I think that merits a separate post though. For now, let me just say thank you to Donna for the copies of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Sour Tales for Sweethearts; it's a thrill to add such a striking edition of Talented to my Highsmith and Ripley collection (and so soon after finally acquiring a first edition too), and to know that in the shape of Sour Tales I've made a small contribution to the wider Highsmith library.

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.

A Tom Ripley / Ripliad TV Series, and Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley: British First Edition (Cresset Press, 1957)

Obsessive Patricia Highsmith/Tom Ripley nut that I am, it would be remiss of me, I feel, not to comment in some fashion on the recent(ish) news that Highsmith's Ripliad could well be heading for television. Except that, as yet, there's not much to comment on. The Hollywood Reporter reports that the proposed series is to be produced in partnership with Highsmith's literary executor, Diogenes Verlag, with Philipp Keel – son of the late Daniel Keel, founder of Diogenes – serving as an executive producer, and that the "vision for the TV series is to expand on Rene Clement's 1960 feature Purple Moon and Anthony Minghella's Matt Damon-starrer The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) – both of which were based on the first book in the series – and explore the depth, sophistication and complexity of the character of Tom Ripley". But the magazine does also state that the producers will be bringing not just The Talented Mr. Ripley to television but Highsmith's "five-book series", so there's reason to suppose that the Ripliad as a whole will be televised.

I'll be keeping a keen eye on developments there, but in a curious case of coincidence, one of which Highsmith herself would surely have approved, shortly before the announcement of the Ripley TV series I finally got my hands on a copy of the one Ripley book – indeed the one book above all others – that I've had at the top of my wants list ever since I started collecting books:

A British first edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley, published by the Cresset Press in 1957. Now, I should point out that while the book is the genuine article – a first impression of the British first edition, as denoted by the title and copyright pages:

– the dust jacket, well, isn't. It's a facsimile dust jacket, which I ordered from the appropriately named Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC after winning the book on eBay for not much more than fifty quid – an absolute bargain considering the cheapest jacketless copy of the Cresset edition currently on AbeBooks is an ex-library affair with both endpapers removed (and replaced) offered at north of £100. And even factoring in the price of the facsimile jacket, which set me back an additional twenty quid (including shipping from America), it's still quite the steal, especially when the only other facsimile jacketed copy of the book on AbeBooks at present is priced at £175. (British first editions in their original jackets are more like £700–£1,000.)

Value aside, though, the real pleasure for me, as a Highsmith and Ripley fanatic, comes in simply owning the thing – the one Ripley novel that I didn't own in British first, and one of only two Highsmith novels that I didn't own in British first (the other being Strangers on a Train, Highsmith's debut). Oh, I own other editions of The Talented Mr. Ripley which I prize – a lovely 1960 Pan paperback, a striking 1959 Dell paperback, a 1973 Heinemann hardback – but to finally have in my hands – and, when it's not in my hands, on my Highsmith shelf – a true British first of the novel, even one in a facsimile jacket, is especially thrilling.

The dust jacket design is uncredited – it could be the work of Joan Hassall, Kenneth Rowntree, Hugh Walker or possibly even Hans Tisdall, all of whom were designing wrappers for Cresset Press around this period – or it could be none of those designers – so I've added it to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s under 'Designer Unknown'. In the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery, however, it has assumed its proper place in between my Cresset Press edition of The Blunderer and Heinemann edition of Deep Water.

Tom Ripley has been much in the news of late, no doubt in part for the reasons outlined at the start of this post, but he's also been much on my mind – even more so than usual – and not merely because of the proposed TV show. Obviously my acquisition of this copy of The Talented Mr. Ripley is one reason for that, but I've also acquired a very special copy of a later Ripley novel, one which I'll be writing about before too long, plus I came across an article, written by Patricia Highsmith in 1989, on the real life inspiration for Tom. And I'll be blogging about that article soon.

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.

A Big Long List of the Books I Read in 2014: Novels, Graphic Novels and Short Story Collections

NB: Linked in Patti Nase Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books roundup, 19/12/14. Thanks Patti!

Well that threw a spanner in the works. I had every intention of posting one last book review – of Victor Canning's third "Birdcage" novel, The Mask of Memory (1974) – before embarking on my traditional, widely reviled, even more widely ignored, still more widely unregistered, end-of-year review of the year; but then the illustrated books publisher I work for, Ilex, got bought by a bigger publishing company, Octopus, and my life was thrown into disarray (short version: in the space of less than two weeks I went from living and working in Lewes, with a walk to work of fifteen minutes, to living in Lewes and working in London, with a journey to work of at least two hours) and blogging had to take a back seat while I wrestled – continue to wrestle – with a long commute and new offices and new work colleagues and new systems and so forth. The upshot of all of which is that not only will the book review have to wait, so will the widely reviled/ignored/unregistered review of the year – possibly until this time next year; as things stand it's unlikely I'll have either the time or energy to properly unpack the year's events chez Louis XIV before 2014 draws to a close.

Instead, because it's a comparatively less taxing task, I thought I'd assemble my similarly traditional big long list of the books I read, with its equally traditional links to whatever I've written about each book (if anything) and ensuing attendant half-hearted, half-arsed analysis. And this year's list, arranged in roughly the order in which I read the books, looks like this:

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (Hodder, 2013)
Richard Stark's Parker: Slayground by Darwyn Cooke (IDW, 2013)
Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill (Knockabout, 2013)
Nobody's Perfect by Donald Westlake (Hodder, 1978)
Firebreak by Richard Stark (Robert Hale, 2002; originally 2001)
Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens by Michael Gilbert (Hodder, 1982)
To Catch a Spy, selected by Eric Ambler (The Bodley Head, 1964)
The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship That Sank Twice by Mike Carey, Peter Gross et al (DC/Vertigo, 2013)
Batman: Detective No. 27 by Michael Uslan, Peter Snejberg et al (DC, 2003)
High-Rise by J. G. Ballard (Jonathan Cape, 1975)
Ashenden, or, The British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham (Heinemann, 1928/1934)
Point Blank by Richard Stark (Allison & Busby, 1984; originally 1962) (reread)
The Man with the Getaway Face by Richard Stark (Allison & Busby, 1984; originally 1963) (reread)
The Outfit by Richard Stark (Allison & Busby, 1984; originally 1963) (reread)
Russian Roulette by James Mitchell (Hamish Hamilton, 1973)
The Moonshine War by Elmore Leonard (Dell, 1970; originally 1969)
The Whisper in the Glen by P. M. Hubbard (Atheneum, 1972)
The Tin Men by Michael Frayn (Collins, 1965)
High Tide by P. M. Hubbard (Macmillan, 1971)
A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin (Michael Joseph, 1954)
Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1977)
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes by Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsbury, 1987)
The Black House by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1981)
A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1965)
Those Who Walk Away by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1967)
Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1974) (reread)
Unsung Road by Simon Harvester (Jarrolds, 1960)
Firecrest by Victor Canning (Heinemann, 1971)
The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning (Heinemann, 1972)
Breakout by Richard Stark (Robert Hale, 2003; originally 2002)
Her by Harriet Lane (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014)
Danger in the Dark by Patricia Carlon (Ward Lock, 1962)
City Primeval by Elmore Leonard (W. H. Allen, 1981; originally 1980)
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke (Hutchinson, 1968) (reread)
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald (Gerald Duckworth, 1978)
Split Images by Elmore Leonard (W. H. Allen, 1983; originally 1981)
Cat Chaser by Elmore Leonard (Viking, 1986; originally 1982)
The Hospital Suite by John Porcellino (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014)
Killshot by Elmore Leonard (Viking, 1989)
The Finger of Saturn by Victor Canning (Heinemann, 1973)
The Mask of Memory by Victor Canning (Heinemann, 1974)
Ant Colony by Michael DeForge (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014)
Safari Honeymoon by Jesse Jacobs (Koyama Press, 2014)
Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (Collins, 1981)
The Mammoth Book of Cult Comics, edited by Ilya (Robinson, 2014)

Including Gorky Park and The Mammoth Book of Cult Comics, both of which I'm still reading but both of which I'm reasonably confident I'll finish before the end of the year (there's something to be said for commuting by train at least: I get to read more now), I make that forty-five books, which is five more than I managed to get through in 2013 – something of a surprise, I must admit: what with work and Edie and everything I had thought I was going to be down on last year's total. And of those forty-five books: all were fiction; thirty-one were novels; five were short story collections; one – Ashenden, or, The British Agent – was both a novel and a short story collection; seven were graphic novels; and one was a graphic novel short story collection.

Nine of the books were recently published, i.e. in the last year or two; three were first published in the 2000s; eight were first published in the 1980s; twelve were first published in the 1970s; eleven were first published in the 1960s; one was first published in the 1950s; and one was first published in the 1920s. The vast majority were new to me, however; there were just five that I'd read before – and one of those, Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game, I'd read at least a couple of times before. (I was inspired to do so again this year as a result of acquring a scarce 1989 Heinemann reissue of the novel and watching Wim Wenders's film adaptation of the novel, The American Friend – and rewatching Liliana Cavani's later adaptation Ripley's Game.)

Speaking of Highsmith, she ties with Donald E. Westlake for most-read – and reread – author this year: six books in each case (that's if you exclude Darwyn Cooke's graphic novel adaptation of Westlake/Richard Stark's Slayground, which I do). Elmore Leonard was their closest rival with five books, then Victor Canning – this year's major discovery for me – with four, and P. M. Hubbard with two. Everyone else was one book apiece. Twenty-three of the books were what one might class as crime fiction; ten were spy fiction; and the rest were a mixture of science fiction, horror, fantasy and literary works. All of which, glancing back at my lists for 2013 and 2012, suggests that the makeup and breadth of my reading was not dissimilar to that of previous years.

And as in previous years, for my next post I'll be picking my ten favourites from the books I read over the past twelve months – although whether that post will appear before 2014 breathes its last is anyone's guess.

Her by Harriet Lane (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014): Book Review, Signed First Edition

Following on from last week's post about a British first edition of The Blunderer, Patricia Highsmith's second novel (under her own name), I thought I'd take a look at one or two other first editions of sophomore novels by female authors, starting with a book by a writer who cites Highsmith's work as an influence on her own:

Her, by Harriet Lane, published in hardback by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2014, which makes it that rarest of things on Existential Ennui, a new book! (Relatively speaking; it came out in June.) The dust jacket design is uncredited, but taken in combination with the case design:

which is a reversed-out treatment of the jacket title on a bright blue printed PLC – as opposed to the more usual coloured arlin – and the bright yellow endpapers, it's a simple but very striking and effective design overall. Additionally, this particular copy is quite special:

It's signed by the author on the title page, and dated pre-publication – much like my first edition of Lane's 2012 debut, Alys, Always, a quietly brilliant novel which wound up as one of my top ten books of 2013 – hence why I decided to secure a similarly adorned first of Lane's latest. And I'm glad I did; for while Her isn't quite on a par with Alys, Always, it's still slyly engaging, the narrative alternating – and sometimes overlapping – chapter by chapter between the (first person present tense) accounts of thirtysomething London middle(ish) class types Emma and Nina, the former ground down by motherhood and a typically useless husband, the latter wafting seemingly effortlessly through life – a career as an artist, a wealthy architect husband – and yet harbouring a secret grudge against Emma. The nature of that grudge is only made explicit towards the novel's shattering climax; prior to that point it's a guessing game as to why Nina is inveigling herself into Emma's life: to what ultimate and likely nefarious purpose?

The reviews of Her – the reviews in newspapers, I mean; the reviews on the books blogs I've seen (er, like this one...) are as earnestly hamfisted as one would expect – have been largely positive, although this Telegraph one reckons the novel gets "bogged down in slow domesticity". Actually for me that "slow domesticity" is key to the book's success: I found Lane's detailing of Emma's loss of sense of self in the face of the ceaseless demands of her baby girl and toddler boy almost more absorbing than Nina's Machiavellian machinations, although that could be because I have a one-year-old daughter myself.

And something else I was struck by, as with Alys, Always, was a parallel with Patricia Highsmith's work. It's not as pronounced here as it is in Lane's debut, which was clearly influenced by The Talented Mr. Ripley, but even so, in the way in which Emma and Nina become fascinated by one another, there are similarities with how Highsmith often has two protagonists – male in her case – fixate on one another, and switches the narrative back and forth accordingly: see Walter and Kimmel in The Blunderer, Rydal and Chester in The Two Faces of January, Tom and Jonathan in Ripley's Game, and so forth.

Anyway, there are ulterior motives and Machiavellian manoeuvring at play in the next sophomore novel I'll be looking at, a book which I only became aware of in the wake of last year's Jones-Day family holiday to Suffolk.