Ripley's Game

Tom Ripley is at a party in Fontainebleau when Jonathan Trevanny — a picture framer, English, polite, with the look of someone in quiet difficulty — makes a remark about Ripley being an American who lives in France and does nothing in particular. The remark is nothing. Ripley decides to destroy him.

Not kill — just destabilise. He passes Jonathan’s name to a gangster associate as a potential hitman: someone desperate enough, the suggestion goes, to kill for money. Jonathan has a blood disease, a young family, a struggling business, and no future he can afford. And so it begins.

What Highsmith does with this unpromising premise is extraordinary. Jonathan is recruited, carries out one killing, then another, and begins to change — begins, under the pressure of what he is doing, to become something he was not. And Ripley, who caused all of this for a trivial reason, finds himself interested in Jonathan, protective of him, doing things that are as close to decent as Ripley has ever managed.

Ripley’s Game is widely considered the finest novel in the series. It is also the one in which Highsmith comes closest to allowing Ripley genuine moral complexity — not good, never good, but capable of something that looks from certain angles like it.

Reading Guides

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

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Ripley’s Game apart: The finest novel in the series by most readers’ reckoning; Jonathan Trevanny is one of her greatest secondary characters; and The moral inversion — Ripley as the nearest thing to a good man — is brilliantly handled. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Ripley’s Game give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Ripley’s capacity for something like friendship — his most humanising novel. Corruption as a process observable in real time. The man who starts with a small transgression and cannot stop. 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’s Game 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

Requires some familiarity with Ripley’s established character to fully appreciate. The Mafia plot is less interesting than the Ripley-Jonathan dynamic. 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 Ripley series; psychological thriller enthusiasts

The Third Ripley Novel and Its Two Adaptations

Ripley’s Game was published in 1974 and adapted twice for film. Wim Wenders’s Der amerikanische Freund (1977), which drew on both this novel and Ripley Under Ground, starred Dennis Hopper as Ripley and Bruno Ganz as the terminally ill man Ripley recruits into crime. Liliana Cavani directed a second, more faithful adaptation in 2002, with John Malkovich as Tom Ripley and Dougray Scott as Jonathan Trevanny. The two films make for an instructive comparison: Wenders’s Ripley is louder and more visibly unhinged, whereas Malkovich’s is cold, elegant, and faintly bored — closer to Highsmith’s original. Malkovich had also played Ripley in a 1999 BBC television production, Ripley Under Ground, making him the only actor to play the character in two separate productions.

The Premise and Its Logic

The novel begins with a casual cruelty: at a party, Ripley responds to a minor social slight from picture-framer Jonathan Trevanny by spreading a false rumour that Trevanny has a fatal blood disease. When a Hamburg gangster approaches Ripley about hiring someone to kill two Mafia figures, Ripley nominates Trevanny — knowing that the rumour has made Trevanny believe he is dying, and that a man who thinks he has nothing to lose makes a useful instrument. The premise distils Highsmith’s fascination with the mechanics of moral compromise: how does a respectable person become capable of violence? Not through character failure alone, but through the specific pressure of circumstance — a little leverage, a little deception, and the right lie told at the right moment.

Ripley’s Place in the Series

Read in sequence, Ripley’s Game gains additional depth from what we already know of Tom Ripley. By 1974 Highsmith had spent nearly two decades living with her creation, and the Ripley of this novel is a settled European gentleman who tends his roses, loves his art, and has long since made his peace with what he is. The shock of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) — the discovery of a murderer at the centre of an apparently charming young man — has been replaced by something more unsettling: acceptance, even comfort. Ripley is at home in himself, and Highsmith is at home writing him. Jonathan Trevanny functions in the novel partly as the reader’s surrogate — the ordinary person drawn into Ripley’s world and changed by it in ways that cannot be reversed. The contrast between Ripley’s equanimity and Jonathan’s deterioration is the novel’s moral architecture. That Ripley is the calmer, more competent, more useful figure in a crisis — that his criminal experience makes him, in practical terms, the more reliable man — is the novel’s quiet, deeply uncomfortable joke at the reader’s expense. We find ourselves relieved that Ripley is there, and then have to live with having felt that.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.3/5 — The finest Ripley novel — Highsmith’s most morally intricate construction, in which Tom Ripley becomes the closest thing to a hero he ever manages, and the process of corruption is observed with devastating precision.