Done With Ripley

Although I did read them out of order, I finished my last Mr Ripley “murder mystery” today – The Boy Who Followed Ripley – which was actually the fourth of the Ripliad, coming before Under Water. Highsmith wrote about her protagonist over a period of thirty-six years, constituting a time line where Ripley held true to his talented traits, continuing to kill with blunt instruments and witnessing suicides and accidental deaths always near water. Maybe others have delved for symbolic meaning, but I do not feel up to it, or even interested.

As the Ripley saga matures, Highsmith endows his victims with baser qualities, connections to criminal activities themselves whether art forgeries, kidnapping or the Mob. Somehow, this might lead a reader to decide Ripley’s murders are more justifiable. Others could conclude that through his associates, he is lured into executing his proclivities towards the use of violence.

Ripley becomes “heroic” only because he encounters incompetence in his pursuers, indifference in his victims’ survivors and indulgence in his wife. Although not quite as unsettling as Ripley’s Game where he orchestrates the corruption and demise of a neighbor, in TBWFR, he tries to allay the guilt of a teenager who killed his father, initially as coldly and without apparent motivation as Tom’s youthful murders. Tom wants Frank Pierson to shed his guilt, enjoy his family’s wealth and get on with his life. Like Ripley, Frank’s family does not believe him guilty and the only person who does, like most of the characters Highsmith populates the Ripliad with, is made out to be unstable and unbelievable herself.

There will never be a Sherlock Holmes or even Columbo antagonist to bring Ripley to justice. His charm will forever cover his depravity and greed. A reader looking for an uber-theme has to focus on the concept of justice and retribution. One is left to question how comfortable it is to live in a world wherein the scales are not balanced all of the time. How ironic that I was reading these books during the trial of Casey Anthony acquitted in the murder of her three year old daughter. Will Casey become rich from writing her own “If I Did It” book? Will she revert to her partying days? Marry? Ever birth another child? The wisdom of the crowd calls for her punishment, as do those who get to know the fictional Mr. Ripley.