Ripley's Game

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Ripley's Game or The American Friend (also Ripley's Game or Rule without Exception , original title Ripley's Game ) is a crime novel by the American writer Patricia Highsmith from 1974 . After The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and Ripley Under Ground (1970), it is the third novel about the serial killer Tom Ripley . The book was first published in 1974 by the British publisher Heinemann and in 1976 in a German translation by the Swiss publisher Diogenes .

In order to help an acquaintance active in the Hamburg gambling milieu in the fight against the Italian mafia , the American Tom Ripley threads an intrigue: The inconspicuous, leukemia sufferer Jonathan Trevanny is to be persuaded to kill two mafiosi in order to provoke a gang war between the competing mafia families .

action

The American Tom Ripley lives with his French wife Heloise in a house in Villeperce-sur-Seine near Paris. He finances his dandy lifestyle from the fortune of Dickie Greenleaf, who he murdered years ago . He draws additional income from dubious courier services for his compatriot Reeves Minot, who lives in Hamburg, and income from an art forgery ring he helped initiate.

Six months after Ripley's last murder of an art collector who threatened to uncover the art forger ring, Minot turns to him with a request: Because the Italian mafia wants to get involved in the Hamburg gambling scene and Minot sees its business endangered, he asks Ripley to help with the search for a contract killer who, if possible, should not have appeared before. This is supposed to kill a member of the competing Mafia families in order to trigger a war between them. Ripley's choice falls on Jonathan Trevanny, a British man suffering from leukemia, who runs a picture frame shop near Ripley and, as Ripley overhears, made a condescending remark about him at a party. Rumor has it that Trevanny's condition has worsened. Trevanny finally believes that himself. In order to secure the livelihood of his wife and young son after his death, Trevanny finally accepts Minot's offer to shoot a Mafioso in Hamburg for a considerable sum, although he has a connection between the rumors about his illness and the Suspects murder order. Trevanny carries out the murder, the money is transferred to a Swiss bank account.

Soon afterwards Trevanny received an invitation to Munich from Minot , combined with a new assignment. This time he is supposed to kill a mafioso with a noose during a train journey. After initial resistance, Trevanny agrees again. On the train, Trevanny, who cannot bring himself to commit the murder, receives unexpected assistance from Ripley, who strangles the Mafioso as intended and pushes one of his bodyguards off the moving train. Ripley explains his intervention with the dangerousness of the job, which he did not want to expect of him alone.

Back in France, sympathy develops between the two men, reinforced by the fact that the Mafia has identified Minot as the mastermind and is now looking for Ripley and Trevanny. With Trevanny's help, he kills two mafiosi during a break-in at Ripley's house; Before the murder of the second, Ripley forces the latter to divert the trace of him by calling his employers. Then they drive the corpses to a distant place and burn them in their car.

Trevanny's wife Simone, who suspects a connection between her husband's unexpected windfall and the murdered Mafiosi, wants to get a divorce. During a conversation between her, her husband and Ripley, another attack occurs, in which two Mafiosi and Trevanny are killed. Minot had fallen into the hands of the Mafia and betrayed Trevanny's name under torture. Ripley fears that the link between the murders will be uncovered and that the police will soon bother him. When he met Simone in the street weeks later, she spat at him as she passed. He realizes that Simone has decided to keep the money from the contract kills and not to reveal the names of the co-conspirators who are still alive.

background

Ripley's Game was written between January 1971 and January 1972 and was the first novel in the series that was told not only from the perspective of the title character, but from two perspectives (Ripley and Jonathan Trevanny). The main drive for writing the book for Highsmith was "dealing with the fear of death that we all live with."

Because of a threatened lawsuit by the Swiss Bank Association , to whom the “fee” for Trevanny's murder assignments is transferred in the novel, the name of the latter was changed to an anonymous Swiss bank in the German translation.

reception

“It is the gentle protective magic hand of Patricia Highsmith who has eaten her fool on this Filou and prefers to fool and cheat and bluff until it groans in the novel than to let her lucky boy stumble into the otherwise hopeless gloom that she allows Rightly owes its high thriller fame. […] Here it finally becomes clear that Miss Highsmith, once the famous master of suppressed anxiety, turned to the comic subject with a lot of bluff and cheating and without plausibility and tension. "

- The mirror

expenditure

  • Ripley's Game Heinemann, London 1974
  • Ripley's Game Doubleday , New York 1974
  • Ripley's game or rule without exception . Translated by Anne Uhde, Diogenes, Zurich 1976
  • Ripley's Game or The American Friend. Diogenes, Zurich 1977
  • Ripley's Game or The American Friend. Translated by Matthias Jendis . Diogenes, Zurich 2003,

Adaptations

In 1977 Wim Wenders shot The American Friend based on Highsmith's novel. He also used motifs from Ripley Under Ground . Dennis Hopper played Tom Ripley, Bruno Ganz Jonathan Trevanny.

In 2002 Liliana Cavani filmed the book as Ripley's Game with John Malkovich in the title role.

In 2009 the radio station BBC Radio 4 broadcast a one-hour radio play version with Ian Hart as Tom Ripley.

All Tom Ripley novels

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andrew Wilson: Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, Bloomsbury, London 2003; German Beautiful shade. The life of Patricia Highsmith, Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2003.
  2. ↑ a b Gunar Ortlepp: Protective Magic - Review of Ripley's Game or Rule Without Exception in Der Spiegel No. 47/1976, accessed on April 13, 2012.
  3. ^ "He [Wenders] mingled two books for American Friend . One of them he didn't buy. "(" He [Wenders] mixed up two books for The American Friend . He had not acquired rights to one of the two. ") - Patricia Highsmith in an interview with Gerald Peary in: Sight and Sound, Vol. 75, No. 2, 1988, pp. 104-105, accessed April 15, 2012.
  4. ↑ Information page from BBC Radio 4 on the radio play adaptation, accessed on April 19, 2012.