The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

Patricia Highsmith knocked around New York and Mexico and paid the rent in the '40s as a comic book scriptwriter, churning out the skeletal bones for four-color biographical tales of historical figures such as Albert Einstein, Edward Rickenbacker, and others. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, got picked up by Hitchcock and turned into one of his best films, though the book itself is somewhat clumsy and turgid. By the first Ripley book, however, written when she was 34, Highsmith was clearly settling into the strengths that would mark her out as a uniquely memorable writer of crime fiction: cogent portraits of an unsettling psychological depravity accompanied by enviable levels of sophistication in the art of living. Tom Ripley, as Frank Rich pointed out in his epic valentine to the 1999 movie based on this novel, is "an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby"—emerging out of impoverished middle American origins but with a self-defined destiny as broad and fine as the entire world itself, old and new. Highsmith claimed Ripley as her favorite creation and certainly in this first outing with him (of five total, between 1955 and 1991) there's a bracing zest to the proceedings as she puts him through his paces, using, cheating, defrauding, and ultimately murdering, if he must; whatever he is required to do to acquire the life he imagines for himself, that's what he will do. He is the consummate flimflam man, artful and deft, with a knack for finding the weak spot of anyone he meets and ruthlessly exploiting it. He has discriminating taste but, as the novel unfolds, more and more obviously no soul whatsoever. The only suspense on display here, in fact, is how far Ripley will take things. Otherwise it's flat and straightforward, moving steadily forward across time and staying close to the details and rationales, always perfectly understandable, for Ripley's ongoing adventures. By the time he's unloading a corpse over the side of a boat you're likely to start feeling in need of a shower—though, perhaps, with a fine Chianti on hand to enjoy with a light dinner of cold roast chicken and cucumber slices in your robe and slippers after.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)