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...

Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh; First Penguin Paperback Edition (Penguin #455, 1943)

Back in December 2012, I intimated at the close of my month-long series of posts on vintage paperbacks that there'd be further paperback posts on Existential Ennui in the new year. Not entirely unpredictably – this is, after all, a blog about old books (although ones of the hardback variety for the most part) – so it has proved: I posted a 1962 Peter Rabe sleaze softcover at the end of last week – with plenty more non-sleaze Rabe softcovers to come – and now I have for you an even more recent online purchase, the first of a handful of random paperbacks I'll be showcasing in an intermittent fashion over the coming weeks. It's one of my favourite novels, but I've never owned it in any edition of note – until now.

It's the first Penguin paperback edition of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, published in 1943 (Penguin #455), five years after the Chapman & Hall first edition (although, curiously, the copyright line in the Penguin edition states the novel was first published in 1933). Still the preeminent "Novel About Journalists" (as the subtitle has it) – up to a point, Lord Copper; Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning (1967) is, I'd suggest, just as sublime – there have been umpteen impressions and resets of the Penguin paperback over the decades, some of them bearing very similar front covers to this iconic design. But true first impressions are quite uncommon (at time of writing there's only one other copy on AbeBooks, for example), a consequence, perhaps, of the edition's wartime provenance – apart from anything else, the book is printed on very thin paper stock and therefore prone, I imagine, to damage – and, related to that, unique features. Such as the back cover:

where an ARP warden evinces the evident benefits of Eno's Fruit Salt via a toothsome grin worthy of a Terry Gilliam Monty Python animation. Or the inside front cover and first page:

where an advert for Norvic Shoes rather overshadows the admission from Penguin that "war-time production difficulties" have buggered up their backlist. And there's one further advert to be found, on the inside back cover, promoting a confectionery that's very close to my heart:

the good old Mars Bar. Although as the ad's small print states, due to wartime zoning, at the time Mars's "sustaining", "energising", "nourishing" properties could apparently only be enjoyed by citizens in the "Southern Counties". Well, at least I'd have been OK down here in Lewes. "So here's hoping for a quick victory," it adds cheerily, "and plenty of Mars for everyone – everywhere." Hear hear.

Next: finally, the Great Tom Ripley Reread resumes, with The Boy Who Followed Ripley.

Peter Rabe and Sleaze Paperbacks, feat. His Neighbor's Wife (Beacon Signal #B542F, 1962)

NB: A Friday Forgotten Book.

Back at the beginning of the week I posted a rather nice Westlake Score, in the shape of a 1971 British first edition of Donald E. Westlake's Adios, Scheherazade, a work of fiction about a writer trying to pen a sleaze novel – the kind of sleaze novel, in fact, that Westlake himself wrote dozens of in the late 1950s/early 1960s, under a variety of pseudonyms (chiefly Alan Marshall). It's common knowledge among enthusiasts and aficionados that a number of Westlake's friends and contemporaries toiled alongside him in the fields of sleaze, often sharing pen names with him; two of them, Hal Dresner and Lawrence Block, even published their own semi-autobiographical novels on the sleaze scene (respectively, The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books, 1965, and Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man, 1971). But I only very recently realised that one of Westlake's major influences wrote a handful of sleaze novels too, a nugget of info I uncovered as a result of spotting, and then winning, this on eBay: 

His Neighbor's Wife, by Peter Rabe, published in the US in paperback by Beacon Signal in 1962 (cover art uncredited). Now, this one isn't, strictly speaking, a sleaze novel; it's obviously been packaged (and possibly titled) as such by Beacon, and Rabe told George Tuttle in 1989 that he wrote it as a "quickie with pornographic overtones... when I was very short of money and simply had to knock something out". (Ooer, missus.) But it's actually more of a psychological melodrama than anything – admittedly with a bit of additional bed-hopping between the four leads, but overall not too far removed from the bulk of Rabe's crime and suspense canon.

Perhaps that's why Rabe allowed it to be published under his own name – unlike the other two novels he wrote for Beacon: Her High School Lover and New Man in the House. Published in 1963 under the nom de plume Marco Malaponte, Rabe described them to Tuttle as "absolute crap", adding "everything just deteriorated as far as the craft was concerned". In light of which, as keen on Rabe's work as I am, I probably won't be seeking them out. (An aside: Rabe again assumed an alias in 1975, that of J. T. MacCargo – not to write sleaze, but to pen two Mannix novelisations. I doubt I'll ever buy those either.)

On balance, His Neighbor's Wife might well be the most collectible – which is to say, expensive – of all of Rabe's novels; of the five copies currently available on AbeBooks, the cheapest is around sixty quid (with the more expensive more like ninety), so I was pretty pleased to win my copy – from a British seller, unusually – for much less than that, and in splendid condition too.

And there'll be much, much more from Peter Rabe on Existential Ennui over the next month or so, because I've a whole stack of Rabe paperback originals to unveil, all of which will be accompanied by commentary by none other than the aforementioned Donald Westlake (as a consequence, I'll be cross-posting them on The Violent World of Parker). In amongst those, I'll be spotlighting some other, non-Rabe, paperbacks I've acquired of late – and while I'm in a teaser-y frame of mind, let me just mention that on top of all that, next week (fingers crossed) I'll finally be returning to the Great Tom Ripley Reread, with the fourth novel in the Ripliad, The Boy Who Followed Ripley. Hope you can join me then.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré: a Review (Gollancz, 1963)

Having recently read and reviewed John le Carré's first two novels – Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) – it seemed only right and proper that I should tackle his third one too: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. For one thing, it's arguably le Carré's most famous book (although in recent years it's perhaps been surpassed by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, as a result of that later novel's 2011 film adaptation); for another, it's widely regarded as his best (although, as brilliant as it is, for my money Tinker is the better novel); and finally, it's actually a sequel of sorts to Call for the Dead – so with that novel still fresh in my mind, what better time to pluck my 1963 first edition (second impression) of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold from the shelves and give it a go.

As it turns out, it's quite a different novel to its two predecessors. Both Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality have an element of the murder mystery to them – much more so in the latter, but that strand of DNA is certainly present in the (largely espionage) genetic makeup of Call. In any case, both are very much reactive novels – British Intelligence operative George Smiley investigating the death of a civil servant and an attendant East German plot in the former, and the rather more down-to-earth death of the wife of a schoolmaster in the latter – whereas The Spy Who Came in from the Cold could be characterized as proactive. Here, the plot is propelled by the machinations of the Circus (MI6) and its head, Control, who hatches a plan to take revenge on Mundt, the East German agent-cum-assassin-turned-Abteilung bigwig who murdered two people in Call (and almost did for Smiley as well).

Furthermore, Smiley isn't the star of Spy. Instead, the man tasked with carrying out Control's fiendish scheme is Alec Leamas, a washed-up operative whose chief East German agent is killed at the beginning of the book. Leamas's assignment is to make himself into a candidate for recruitment by East German Intelligence, a goal which entails him hitting the bottle, getting kicked out of the Circus and even being sent to prison for assault. The one chink of light in this dark descent is Liz, a young librarian who becomes his lover, and who will prove instrumental both to his mission, and in his eventual undoing. (Interestingly, not the first time, nor indeed the last, that a woman will be the downfall of a man in a le Carré novel.)

But although Smiley, supposedly still retired after the events of Call for the Dead, doesn't feature much in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, he's a spectral presence throughout. Control enlists his (reluctant) aid in concocting the plan, and he haunts the novel like a portly ghost: glimpsed by Leamas in a greasy spoon and at an airport kiosk; paying Liz a visit with Peter Guillam. He also pops up in the final scene, which brings the action full circle to the East/West Berlin border, but the true climax of the book comes just prior to that, and takes the unexpected shape of a courtroom drama – never my favourite form of fiction, but deployed effectively here by le Carré to lay bare the machinations of Control and the Circus and deliver a final twist which throws a new and awful light on those endeavours.

In the end, le Carré leaves us questioning not only whether the ends justify the means, but whether the ends are desirable either – questions which have as much resonance – as much relevance – today as they did fifty years ago.

Westlake Score: Adios, Scheherazade, by Donald E. Westlake (Hodder & Stoughton, 1971)

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

Before I get to the final John le Carré novel I'll be reviewing in my short series of posts on the author – i.e. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which I'm still reading – let's have a Westlake Score, in the shape of this:

A UK first edition of Adios, Scheherazade, published in hardback by Hodder & Stoughton in 1971, the year after the US Simon & Schuster first. Quite an uncommon book this one: it fell out of print decades ago – in English anyway; there are more recent French editions – making it one of the scarcest of all of Donald E. Westlake's novels – either under his own name or one of his numerous nom de plumes – in any edition, especially so in this British printing. I acquired this copy – for a ridiculously low price – from famed book dealer Jamie Sturgeon, who originally acquired it from... actually I don't really know where Jamie got it from – which I guess is why he's the famed book dealer and I'm simply one of the clueless slobs wot buy books off him.

The dust jacket design is by Lipscombe, Lubbock, Ewart & Holland, doing a grand job of evoking the era, if not the specific milieu, of the novel: that of the American sleaze paperback field, in which Westlake toiled away in the late-1950s/early-1960s under a variety of aliases. Chief among those was Alan Marshall, under which moniker Westlake wrote over a dozen smutty softcovers for Midwood; I blogged about some of them towards the end of last year, inspired by Trent's series of posts over at The Violent World of Parker on the Westlake sleaze catalogue. Adios, Scheherazade is about that part of Westlake's life, and is also one of his more experimental novels; as Ethan Iverson notes in his brief precis of the book as part of his peerless Westlake overview: "here there are 10 chapters of exactly 5000 words each, just like the sex novels the hapless narrator is supposed to be writing".

Speaking of other folks' thoughts on the thing, there's a detailed review of Adios, Scheherazade over at Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books, but perhaps the best piece on the novel available online (linked previously by Andrew Wheeler, Matthew Asprey and Bill Crider) is Earl Kemp's "Nobody Can Write This Shit Forever". Kemp actually edited some of Westlake's sleaze efforts – quite heavily, if Kemp is to be believed – and his candid, gossipy reminiscences as he picks his way through Adios, Scheherazade make for entertaining and arresting reading. As Kemp drily observes: "The [Alan Marshall] manuscripts consistently rose just to almost the absolute minimum required input level."

A Murder of Quality (1962) from The John le Carré Omnibus (Gollancz, 1964)

NB: A Friday Forgotten Book.

Having vowed never again to enslave myself to Existential Ennui by embarking on too many series of posts, I find myself, just three posts on from making that vow, in the midst of, you guessed it, another series of posts. But at least, to horribly paraphrase Eric Burdon, my intentions were good, in that the reason I've ended up reading, and then blogging about, two John le Carré novels in fairly quick succession (we'll skip over this interlude post – there's really no excuse for it) is because they both reside in the book I decided I most wanted to read (rather than most wanted to blog about), i.e. The le Carré Omnibus. Published in 1964 to capitalise on the success of le Carré's third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), it contains the author's first two novels – Call for the Dead (1961), and this:

A Murder of Quality (1962) – which, although it stars Call for the Dead's lead, squat spy George Smiley, isn't, unlike most of le Carré's work, an espionage novel. Instead it's a murder mystery, set in and around the fictional rural public school of Carne, where Smiley, having retired from The Circus (MI6) in Call for the Dead (the first of many retirements from the service), is sent by an old intelligence colleague to find out who killed the wife of one of the schoolmasters. Once there, he quickly discovers what a poisonous place Carne is, populated for the most part by supercilious schoolboys and masters and their equally dreadful wives (the masters' wives, that is, not the boys'; they're a bit young for marriage) and fuelled by gossip and backbiting, a toxic social stew typified by a party Smiley attends where one harridan takes great delight in reminding him of the failure of his marriage.

Indeed, Smiley's distaste for Carne – fear of the place, even – has its roots in his rocky relationship with the wayward Ann: his wife spent her childhood there. Still, George is a square peg in a round hole in most situations; early in the novel a commentator bestows upon him the memorable description "Looks like a frog, dresses like a bookie, and has a brain I'd give my eyes for" – and Smiley certainly puts that brain to good use getting to the bottom of this whodunnit-cum-tragedy. Although in the final analysis, it could be argued that it's the archaic, enervating institution of Carne itself that stands revealed as the true villain of the piece.

To a degree, A Murder of Quality reminded me of The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and not merely because its school setting is echoed in the later novel's title. Like Schoolboy – like Smiley himself, in fact – A Murder of Quality is an odd fish, at least in comparison to the wider le Carré canon. Both books are slightly overlooked works sandwiched between spy fiction classics – A Murder of Quality bookended by Call for the Dead and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; The Honourable Schoolboy by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People – and yet nevertheless are rewarding novels in their own right, possessed of a genuine depth of feeling; in the case of A Murder of Quality, it seems evident le Carré was working through some quite personal issues to do with his time at Sherborne public school in the writing of the book. Furthermore, both, in their own ways, interrupt the longer narrative of their particular segments of the George Smiley series; because as Sergio from Tipping My Fedora points out in the comments on my Call for the Dead post, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is essentially a sequel to le Carré's debut.

In light of which information, it stands to reason that since I'm already immersed in le Carré's world, I might as well stay undercover and plunge ever deeper into his murky milieu, with the aforementioned The Spy Who Came in from the Cold....