Dexter, Ripley and other advocates of the quick and dirty fix

 

There are different sorts of multiple killers that we meet in literature, some who turn it into a avocation which gives life meaning and then those types that stumble into it and find it a useful quick and dirty fix for the grit in the machinery of their lives.  It’s like the WD 40 of locked up nuts or stuck pistons.  I’ve looked at Dexter but not read any of the books which may carry on the satirical aspect of the code of Harry.  He’s the singular and more prolific  assassin than the earlier group of vigilantes ‘The Four Just Men’ of Edgar Wallace which I may or may not have read some time ago.  What Dexter has over them is the police procedural element, the forensic science, blood spatter analysis that give verisimilitude to the gruesome.  De Quincey started it all with ‘The Fine Art of Murder’.  His pedantic footnotes set a style of high toned persiflage which persists in the English essay and perhaps has  influenced such eschatologists as William T. Vollman.

The Gorse series by Patrick Hamilton follows the trail of bodies that the protagonist despatches without a trace of remorse or a scintilla of finesse.  You have money, I want it, therefore I must take it and if you threaten me it’s your own fault if I erase you.  Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is that sort of problem solver, an impetuous boy that regards being slighted as a capital offence.  How close he comes to being caught is part of the tension that is created around this classic sociopath.   I am reading ‘Ripley’s Game’ again and I am pleasantly surprised by how good it is and how much of the plot I’d forgotten.

I’m paused at episode three of ‘Ripley’ on Netflix.  A very stylish version of book one in the series, more low key and real than the glam Damon, Law, Paltrow trio in a previous film which was as much about knitwear and slacks as murder and impersonation.  Andrew Scott is a grim, sullen, resentful man who takes passive aggression into an active mode.  He seems to be able to create a perceptible void about himself, like an aura of emptiness.

Ireland’s own forensic pathologist Dr. Marie Cassidy has created a stylish elegant persona  walking into crime scenes in high class tailoring not quite saying ‘what have you got for me?’.  Her observation "It’s the man in your bed you should be worried about, not the man under your bed"has become a feminist proverb.  Shes Scottish so her pronunciation of 'murder' has the Macbeth ring. '  Ay, my good lord, safe in a ditch he bides,. With twenty trenched gashes on his head —. The least a death to nature.   She has taken to writing novels in her retirement, ‘The Body of Truth’ was her first.  No seriality, just one offs. Must take a look.