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.

'The Talented Mr. Ripley' by Patricia Highsmith

 

Type into the command line of a Linux O.S.  whoami and the response will be ‘root’.  Should Tom Ripley have queried his own central operating system or his soul the answer would be ‘whatever’.  Ripley is a figment or a creation, a fiction, a prodigy of versimilitude composed of shy smiles,  petty schemes and shiftless manoeuvring.  We first meet him using the stationary of the I.R.S.  which he stole while he had the job as a storeroom clerk in one of their offices.  He’s writing dunning letters to various people claiming a short fall in their payments and following that up with avuncular phone calls advising them to settle.  You can be anyone you like on the phone, phoney.  So far all he’s been getting are cheques so the joy of the con is all that in it for him.  Eventually he will take this this impersonation  to the ultimate merger and will become that which he pretends to.  The inconvenient existence of this persona has to lapse for this achievement.

Being an imposter is a strenuous occupation but at first it seems only a holiday by the sea in Italy near Palermo.  The man that he thinks is  following him because of his I.R.S. scam is none other than Greenleaf pere who is under the impression that Ripley is a great friend of his son Dickie who is trust funding his passion for painting and not inclined to come home to take up his responsibility as the heir of a large boat building business.  The boy is not inclined to see this and T.R.'s mission should he accept it is to go over there and persuade him to come back.  The trouble is that Tom does not really know Dickie at all but the offer of a return first class liner ticket and a wodge of money makes him decide to chance it.

Even on the boat going over he is trying on different Tom Ripleys using a cap as a prop.

He had a sudden whim for a cap and bought one in the haberdashery, a conservative bluish-grey cap of soft English wool. He could pull its visor down over nearly his whole face when he wanted to nap in his deck-chair, or wanted to look as if he were napping. A cap was the most versatile of head-gears, he thought, and he wondered why he had never thought of wearing one before? He could look like a country gentleman, a thug, an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a plain American eccentric, depending on how he wore it. Tom amused himself with it in his room in front of the mirror. He had always thought he had the world's dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist's face, he thought. The cap changed all that. It gave him a country air, Greenwich, Connecticut, country. Now he was a young man with a private income, not long out of Princeton, perhaps. He bought a pipe to go with the cap.

He is reinventing himself and the smoothness of the sleight of hand as he gets Dickie Greenleaf to accept him as an acquaintance from an established cadre of socially sound people is quite excellent:

       'You don't seem to remember me from New York,' Tom said.

       'I can't really say I do,' Dickie said. 'Where did I meet you?'

       'I think—Wasn't it at Buddy Lankenau's?' It wasn't, but he knew Dickie knew Buddy Lankenau, and Buddy was a very respectable fellow.

So far we are with Ripley trying to pull himself  into a new life, to make something of himself.  It’s when he begins to make someone of himself other than his own self that we begin to draw back and resist identification with a man who has not got a firm grip on his identity.  Tom you see is his own creature enjoying the translucence of consciousness.  Like a sage of psychopathy he does not identify with any collection of personal attributes as a given ground of ‘lived experience’.  He lives his experience a different way uniting its elements with the desire to absorb the other.  In every way this novel is a psychopathic farce, an homicidal ‘Charley’s Aunt’.  The posse are the front door he goes out by the french window and joins them round the front to call on himself.  Highsmith puts him into situations that make us gasp and stretch our eyes as he lies and lies and gets away with it.

By the way forget the film which blunts the evil for the sake of interiors and beautiful knitware, the book’s the thing.