The Talented Mr. Ripley

Tom Ripley, a broke young con man scraping by on petty mail fraud in New York, is hired by shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf to travel to Italy and persuade his son Dickie to come home. Once in the seaside town of Mongibello, Tom instead attaches himself to Dickie's comfortable, aimless life, growing obsessed with his money, his clothes and his ease, and when Dickie starts pulling away, irritated by how closely Tom has begun imitating him, Tom kills him on a boat trip, beating him with an oar and sinking the body offshore. Rather than flee, Tom assumes Dickie's identity outright, forging signatures and living on his money and even courting his own reputation as Dickie among strangers, until Dickie's friend Freddie Miles gets too close to the truth and Tom kills him too. Interviewed repeatedly by the police, by Dickie's grieving father, by Dickie's girlfriend Marge, and by a private investigator the Greenleafs hire, Tom talks his way through every suspicion by staging Dickie's apparent suicide and forging a will that leaves Dickie's inheritance to him. The novel ends with Tom safely in Greece, wealthy under his own name again, still tallying every small risk of exposure left behind him, guilty of nothing in his own mind but having wanted, for a while, to be someone else.

Highsmith writes almost entirely from inside Tom's calculations, and the effect is unsettling in a way few thrillers of the period risked: there is no detective hero to root for, only Tom's cool, persuasive logic, which the reader follows so closely that rooting for him to get away with it becomes hard to avoid and harder to admit.

Highsmith traced Ripley to a single early morning in Positano, the Italian coastal town behind Mongibello, when she watched a solitary young man in shorts and sandals cross the beach below her hotel balcony and began imagining an entire life of comfortable deception for a stranger she never met.