Ripley Under Ground

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Ripley Under Ground is a 1970 crime novel by the American author Patricia Highsmith . It is the second novel about the serial killer Tom Ripley after The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) . The German translation was published in 1972 under the same title by the Swiss Diogenes Verlag .

action

The American Tom Ripley lives in the (fictional) village of Villeperce-sur-Seine near Paris . He is now 31 years old, married to the French woman Héloise and leads an idle life, financed by the inherited fortune of Dickie Greenleaf, who he murdered six years ago, and the donations of his rich father-in-law. His additional income includes the income from an art forgery ring , which he helped initiate. Since the British painter Derwatt committed suicide during a period of depression , two London gallery owners, Tom's friends, have been faking his continued life. Derwatt, so the official announcement, lives and works under a false name in Mexico . The pictures made after Derwatt's suicide fetch just as high prices as the originals, but are in fact by the painter Bernard Tufts, a former friend and admirer of Derwatt.

When the American art collector Thomas Murchison, who owns a painting by Derwatt, questions its authenticity, the forger's ring is in danger. First, Ripley tries to solve the problem by disguising himself as Derwatt at an exhibition opening in London and assuring Murchison that his painting is authentic. When that was not enough, he invited Murchison, now performing as Tom Ripley, to his house in France to show him his collection of Derwatts as objects for comparison. After unsuccessful efforts to dissuade Murchison from his research, Ripley murders him. While the French and British police are looking for the missing Murchison and are also searching Ripley's property for this purpose, Ripley receives a surprising visit from a relative of Dickie Greenleaf and then from Bernard Tufts. With the help of Tufts, he removes Murchison's body. Tufts is plagued by persistent feelings of guilt towards the dead Derwatt and suffers from the separation from his girlfriend, who no longer wants to support his forgery. Finally he turns against Ripley, whom he blames for his misery as the initiator of the forger's ring, and tries to kill him. Ripley survived and traveled to Salzburg after Tufts . When Tufts finally commits suicide, Tom burns the corpse, leaving a ring in the ashes that he wore as Derwatt to simulate his suicide.

Unlike the first novel, Ripley Under Ground has an open ending: the narrative breaks off suddenly while the investigation is still ongoing. Ripley encourages himself when the phone rings and he suspects the police are on the other end.

background

As early as 1958, Patricia Highsmith had thought about a sequel to the first Ripley novel under the title The Alarming Return of Mr Ripley , a project that she did not put into practice. In late 1968 she began writing Ripley Under Ground . Highsmith dated the novel six years after Tom Ripley's murder of Dickie Greenleaf and characterized Ripley no longer as an insecure young man, but as "of mystic origin, a font of evil". According to her statement, the case of the art forger Han van Meegeren, among other things, inspired the novel.

Highsmith biographer Andrew Wilson also saw parallels with Oscar Wilde's novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray : “Both Ripley and Dorian wear the mask of respectability and seemingly eternally youthful beauty; they surround themselves with aesthetically pleasing objects in the belief that the surface and the style are more important than the substance. ”Like Ripley, Dorian longs to assume the identity of another, and Ripley has traits of“ Wilde's decadence ”. - A quote from Oscar Wilde's letters precedes Highsmith's novel.

The fictional village of Villeperce-sur-Seine is located not far from the city of Fontainebleau , in the vicinity of which Highsmith lived from 1967 to 1981. Tom Ripley's estate is called "Belle Ombre" (dt. "Beautiful shadow"), which later served as the title of a biography about the author.

1974 followed with Ripley's Game, the third novel from the Tom Ripley series.

reception

"Thanks to her mesmerizing artistry, [Patricia Highsmith] catapults the detective novel to a very high place in the hierarchy of literature."

- The Times

Adaptations

1977 turned Wim Wenders with The American Friend officially an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game . In fact, he also used motifs from Ripley Under Ground . Dennis Hopper played Tom Ripley.

In 1982 the documentary Patricia Highsmith: A Gift for Murder ran in the series The South Bank Show on the British broadcaster “London Weekend Television” / ITV . In this, scenes from Ripley Under Ground were dramatized, with Jonathan Kent as Tom Ripley.

In 1989, the Hessischer Rundfunk in cooperation with the Südwestfunk brought out a radio play lasting almost two hours. The director had Götz Fritsch .

In 2005, Roger Spottiswoode filmed the novel under the book title Ripley Under Ground , Barry Pepper took on the role of Tom Ripley.

In 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a one-hour radio play version with Ian Hart as Tom Ripley, directed by Claire Grove .

expenditure

  • Ripley Under Ground . Heinemann London 1970.
  • Ripley Under Ground . Doubleday , New York 1970.
  • Ripley Under Ground . Translated by Anne Uhde, Diogenes, Zurich 1972.
  • Ripley Under Ground . Translated by Melanie Walz , Diogenes, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-257-06414-4 .

All Tom Ripley novels

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c 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. ↑ "By her hypnotic art [Patricia Highsmith] puts the suspense story into a toweringly high place in the hierarchy of fiction." - review in the Times on Jan. 21, 1971.
  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 13, 2012.