Ripley Under Ground

Tom Ripley has done well. He lives at Belle Ombre, a gracious house in the French village of Villeperce, with his wife Héloïse — whose family money supports them both without anyone needing to ask too carefully how Tom contributes. He grows mushrooms. He plays the harpsichord. He drinks good wine.

He is also involved, with a London gallery, in selling paintings attributed to Derwatt — a British abstract painter who disappeared in Greece years ago and whom Ripley has quietly arranged to keep ‘producing’ through a forger named Bernard. The scheme is elegant and profitable, and it is working perfectly until an American collector named Thomas Murchison arrives in London with inconvenient doubts.

Ripley Under Ground picks up Ripley’s story fifteen years after the events in Dickie Greenleaf’s apartment in Rome, and finds him embedded in a life that suits him precisely — comfortable, aesthetically refined, insulated by wealth, requiring occasional management of problems that would destroy ordinary men. The art-forgery plot is perfectly chosen: the whole enterprise of selling forged Derwatts is a version of what Ripley has always done — manufacturing identities and selling them to people who want to believe.

Reading Guides

• Patricia Highsmith Books in Order
• Where to Start with Patricia Highsmith

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Ripley Under Ground apart: Ripley’s domestic contentment at Belle Ombre is wickedly observed; The art-world setting is perfectly chosen; and The escalating problem-management is darkly comic. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Ripley Under Ground give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Ripley as a man who has found his niche — comfortable crime in rural France. Art forgery as a metaphor for Ripley’s own constructed identity. The second novel deepens rather than repeats the first. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

Craft and Construction

What lifts Ripley Under Ground above the competent is the control Patricia Highsmith exercises over pacing and information. The reader is never ahead of the story, but neither is the mystery artificially maintained by withholding plausible deductions. The solution arrives feeling earned rather than arbitrary — the definitive test of plot construction in crime and thriller fiction.

Limitations

Slightly lower stakes than The Talented Mr Ripley — Ripley is more in control. The Derwatt scheme requires patience to set up. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of The Talented Mr. Ripley; psychological thriller fans

The Second Ripley Novel

Ripley Under Ground was published in 1970, fifteen years after The Talented Mr. Ripley, and represents Highsmith’s decision to return to her most famous character after a long pause. Where the first novel followed the rise of an ambitious young nobody, this novel shows him settled — Tom Ripley has married Héloïse, acquired a farmhouse in Villeperce-sur-Seine outside Paris called Belle Ombre, and established himself in the comfortable upper-bourgeois life he murdered his way toward. The novel opens with a threat to this comfort: a fraud involving the work of a dead painter, Derwatt, whose canvases Tom has been selling through his friend Bernard Tufts’s forgeries.

Wim Wenders and the Ripley Films

Wim Wenders’s 1977 film Der amerikanische Freund (The American Friend) drew on elements of both Ripley Under Ground and Ripley’s Game, casting Dennis Hopper as Tom Ripley and Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Zimmermann, the terminally ill framer whom Ripley recruits as an assassin. The film is regarded as among the finest European thrillers of the decade — Wenders’s New Hollywood-inflected visual style applied to Highsmith’s moral territory. Highsmith herself was reportedly dissatisfied with Hopper’s casting and the liberties Wenders took, though the film’s critical reputation has only grown since its release. The divergence between Wenders’s characterisation of Ripley — flamboyant, American, psychopathic in a showy way — and Highsmith’s original — controlled, French-settled, psychopathic in a quiet way — is instructive about what the character has meant to different interpreters.

The Derwatt Fraud

The Derwatt art fraud at the centre of Ripley Under Ground — in which Tom maintains the reputation of a dead painter by having a living artist forge new “Derwatts” — is among Highsmith’s most sophisticated plots for several reasons. It requires Ripley to construct and defend a fiction that depends on other people’s self-interest in believing it, and it exposes him to risk from multiple directions simultaneously: a suspicious American collector, the forger’s instability, and Marge Sherwood’s continued presence in Tom’s life. Highsmith uses the art world as a setting partly because its valuations are themselves constructed and contested — the difference between a genuine Derwatt and a fake is, in the novel’s terms, a matter of documentation and consensus rather than intrinsic quality.

Tom’s Domestic Life

By Ripley Under Ground, Tom is established at Belle Ombre, his French country house, married to Héloïse (a wealthy French heiress who does not know the full history of her husband’s wealth), maintaining a garden and cellar, cultivating art and wine. The domesticity is not a cover but a genuine pleasure: Tom has found the life he wanted, and his engagement with the Derwatt fraud is not desperation but maintenance. Highsmith’s portrayal of the criminal as someone who has achieved a stable, pleasant, aesthetically satisfying life — and who will defend it with measured violence — is more disturbing than any portrayal of crime as driven by need or passion.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Ripley returns, older, settled, and no less dangerous — the art-forgery plot gives Highsmith a perfect vehicle for exploring how Ripley has learned to manage his particular talent.