First things first - Ripley on Netflix is incredible. This is the adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s first novel about part-time psychopath Tom Ripley. We binged three episodes last night and my God, it’s so good.
I love the novels. I remember reading them for the first time in my twenties and being astounded at the way you ended up rooting for the psycho: every other ‘crime’ anything I’d ever encountered involved order being restored and justice being served - goodies triumphant and baddies punished.
Not with Highsmith (an almost unfeasibly terrible person, according to this biographer): Ripley thrives, and if the thriving is threatened, then he does what he has to do, with no pleasure, just as a sort of tiresome but necessary bit of tidying up. The matter-of-fact amorality of it blew my mind. In the later novels the gist is very much ‘Oh what a bore, I have to murder this man and I’d so much rather be pottering about in the garden’.