By John Ramsey Miller

I’ve been reading Patricia Highsmith’s “Ripley” novels of late. They were billed as Psychological Thrillers when they were being published, although I read very little of the element of suspense in them. They are rife with black humor. Tom Ripley’s kills are leisurely affairs, and he is hardly even worthy of being labeled psychopathic when measured against today’s villains. Tom Ripley is the amoral and sociopathic protagonist in the series. He is morally and ethically challenged. He is a murderer. He never kills for pleasure, but he will commit a murder for financial gain, or due to a threat to his self-image or one that could alter his status. To his credit, he doesn’t kill every threat that crosses his path, just the more serious ones and only when circumstances are convenient. And this reader pulls for him to kill those threats and I want him to get away clean and to prosper. Having Tom as the protagonist was quite a feat for a book published in the 1950s, not so much when the last one published in the early 90s. By then ass-bite protagonists and thrillers were becoming a dime a dozen.

When Patricia was writing Strangers on a Train (which became a successful Hitchcock film) and other novels and short stories her work was considered low art–crime fiction in the United States, but she was fully appreciated in Europe and put in the ranks of Conrad, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Camus. In her lifetime she was appreciated but she had to live in Europe to be so.

I enjoy the pacing in her books, her humor, the sudden violence, its aftermath. Tom Ripley is not so good as the cops are incompetent and evidence is rarely gathered or put together. The books are a great relaxing read and very entertaining. Sometimes I just want to read something in 2/4 time.