SOURCE: "Past Crimes," in Armchair Detective, Vol. 27, No. 3, Summer, 1994, p. 360.

In the following essay, the critic discusses Highsmith's five Tom Ripley novels, focusing on Ripley's matter-of-fact attitude toward crime.

Through the years we have had the chance to follow the extraordinarily eccentric life of Patricia Highsmith's Thomas Ripley, who surely must be one of the oddest series figures in crime fiction since Raffles, the gentleman crook. The Ripley novels have been appearing since 1955, and the fifth and latest, Ripley under Water, came out in 1992.

The first in the series is the strongest and probably the most bizarre. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) is truly a masterpiece of crime fiction, one to rival in weirdness Highsmith's first novel, Strangers on a Train. At the beginning of this on-going saga the impecunious Mr. Ripley is hired to go to Europe to find the wayward son of a wealthy Boston couple. By...