The Talented Mr. Ripley
Celebrated Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith understands better than most that thrilling author Patricia Highsmith was a complicated woman.Â
An unwanted child, life at home was a battlefield for Highsmith. Especially with her mother, with whom she continued to tussle as an adult, lobbing venomous letters back and forth. Of course, the author of the Hitchcock-favoured thriller Strangers on a Train was also queer in a time with little patience for such realities, penning lesbian romance The Price of Salt, otherwise known as Carol, under the pseudonym Claire Morgan.Â
Mostly, she preferred the company of cats, eviscerating any fools who approached her unwittingly, as Murray-Smith memorably documented in her smash hit play, Switzerland.
“I have long been invested in The Talented Ms Highsmith and her wildly strange and brilliant mind,” Murray-Smith says.
Highsmith’s prickliness might go some way towards explaining the creation of the slinkiest of cunning murderers: Tom Ripley.Â
Published in 1955, Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley introduced the world to the scammer scrambling along on small-time con jobs in New York until shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf rocks up. Convincing the richer man he’s closer to his son Dickie than he is, Ripley scores the plum gig of pursuing the errant scion to the Italian Riviera, supposedly to bring him home. Only Ripley gets an insatiable taste for the finer side of life, equal parts doting on and despising his rich new frenemy.
The...