The police genre will always have as a singular reference to Patricia Highsmith. This American author created one of the most picturesque, sinister and likeable characters in the entire production of the genre: Tom Ripley. And yet it was not in his mother country where the character in question was best received.
In a way, the author raised many of her works more in tune with a more European idiosyncrasy, more prone to mockery and satire introduced in all genres, including the police, however pure it may be. And Europe ended up welcoming it with open arms.
Although that success also had to do with the release of certain American labels that to a certain extent condemned a paradoxically misony but lesbian author, prone to drinking, capable even of addressing homosexual issues in her books, even though it was initially under a pseudonym ..., and this in America in the mid-twentieth century it was not entirely accepted.
Despite focusing much of his work on Tom Ripley, there is no need to disdain many of his other books in which the particular Tom is not the character. In fact, his first novels without him seem much more complete, without that serial point that every chain of novels with a single protagonist usually acquires.
3 Recommended Novels By Patricia Highsmith
Strangers on a train
In the history of literature there have always been great stories born from ideas as basic as they are fascinating. The suspense genre is very much given to that tendency towards the round story that is based on the tension and the final surprise. And this book is a basic that fascinated even the very Alfred Hitchcock, who had to polish the work in certain aspects to make it less, how to say ... amoral.
Summary: The intrigue of this novel is based on the idea of ​​a crime without motives, a perfect crime: two strangers agree to assassinate each other's enemy, thus providing an indestructible alibi.
Bruno: alcoholic with oedipal problems, latent homosexual, travels on the same train as Guy: ambitious, hard-working, adapted. He begins to talk and Bruno, demonically, forces the other to speak, to discover his weak point, the only crack in his orderly existence: Guy wants to be free of his wife, who betrayed him and who can now hinder his promising future.
Bruno proposes a pact: he will kill the woman and Guy, in turn, Bruno's father, whom he hates. Guy rejects such an absurd plan and forgets it, but not Bruno, who, once his part is done, demands the horrified Guy to do his part ...
Carol
How to create a suspense story from a romantic novel approach? That is one of the greatest assets of this author. It seems that we see a perspective that will inevitably lead us towards development and we end up moving along unpredictable paths ...
Summary: Carol is a romance between women that, I know. she reads with the same fascinated attention that her author's detective novels elicit. Therese, a young set designer accidentally works as a saleswoman, and Carol, an elegant and sophisticated woman, recently divorced, comes in to buy a doll for her daughter and changes the course of the young saleswoman's life forever.
Constructed like a suspense novel, it is filled with pages of tense calm broken by sudden and ominous alarms, and these are more frequent and more exciting than in Patricia Highsmith's detective novels.
Carol It was the first novel with a homosexual theme that did not end tragically, but the fragility of happiness is a sub-theme that permeates the pages of the book; for highsmith, the idea of ​​happiness is inextricably linked to that of danger.
Mister Ripley's talent
Ripley can be the best investigator, the best detective, a bulldog who moves like nobody else through social filth to achieve the objectives for which he is paid. But he has a problem: he likes mud, he is passionate about surrendering to that underworld and he can end up becoming a counter spy for all causes.
Summary: We meet in this novel the haunting and amoral Tom Ripley, a prototypical figure of a genre that Patricia Highsmith has invented, which is situated between the detective novel and the crime novel, between Graham Greene and Raymond Chandler, where the most frenetic suspense is combined with a dizzying psychological analysis.
Mr. Greenleaf, an American millionaire, asks Tom Ripley to try to convince his son Dickie that he is living a golden bohemian in Italy to return home. Tom accepts the assignment, and incidentally puts ground through possible police problems, and meets Dickie and his friend Marge, with whom he establishes a murky and complex relationship.
