Ripley Under Water
Ripley Under Water is a crime novel by the American author Patricia Highsmith . The last of a total of five novels about the character Tom Ripley was published in 1991.
action
As in the previous three novels, Tom Ripley lives with his wife Héloise and the housekeeper Madame Annette in the Villa Belle Ombre in the (fictional) French village of Villeperce-sur-Seine. His fortune and the donations from his wealthy father-in-law enable Tom to devote himself exclusively to hobbies: he takes harpsichord lessons with his wife and grows roses.
The idyll is threatened when the American couple David and Janice Pritchard settle in Villeperce. David Pritchard seems to know more about Tom than he can care for: he calls Tom greetings from Dickie Greenleaf ( Tom's first murder victim whose will he fabricated in his favor), photographs Belle Ombre and even travels Tom on vacation to Tangier to. A meeting between the two ends with Tom beating up Pritchard. Then Pritchard begins a search in the rivers and canals in the area. Tom is certain that Pritchard wants to find the body of the American art collector Murchison. He had also killed this a few years earlier because Murchison wanted to expose counterfeit art from which Tom profited. He had first buried the body in the forest and later thrown it from some bridge in the area into a river.
Eventually Pritchard finds Murchison's remains, which he places in a sack in front of Tom's front door, and calls the police. Tom first hides the sack and later throws it into the deep garden pond on the Pritchard's property. These are non-swimmers and drown trying to recover the bones. The police investigations remain inconclusive, and Tom gets away with it this time too.
Ripley Under Water is the only Ripley novel in which Tom Ripley doesn't kill anyone.
Emergence
Patricia Highsmith began working on Ripley Under Water in March 1988, and in October 1990 she sent the manuscript to her British publisher Bloomsbury , where it was published simultaneously with the German edition by Diogenes Verlag in autumn 1991, and a year later by her American publisher Button .
Previous novels
The author had her protagonist appear in four other books:
- The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)
- Ripley Under Ground (1970)
- Ripley's Game or The American Friend (1974)
- The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980)
Translations
The translation of the German-language first edition by Diogenes was done by Otto Bayer; In 2004 a new translation by Matthias Jendis was published by the same publisher .
Adaptations
radio
BBC Radio 4 aired a radio play adaptation in 2009 with Ian Hart as Tom Ripley and William Hope as David Pritchard.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Andrew Wilson : Beautiful Shadow. The life of Patricia Highsmith . Berlin: Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005, p. 578 ff.