Recommendations
Books Like The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eight novels of charming criminals, identity theft, and the amoral Mediterranean
Highsmith's defining thriller about an identity thief recommends crime fiction and literary thrillers that follow morally complex protagonists whose crimes we participate in imaginatively, and the great tradition of European and American psychological suspense.
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert's confession — the canonical literary novel about a criminal narrator whose eloquence forces the reader to inhabit a perspective they should reject; where Ripley is cold and competent, Humbert is hot and self-justifying; both novels are about the seductiveness of intelligence applied to amoral ends, and both require the reader to examine their own complicity in the narrator's world
- 2Buy
The Ripley Series
by Patricia Highsmith
The four Ripley sequels (Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, Ripley Under Water) follow Tom into middle age and settled comfort in France, still capable of murder when necessary; each is a different variation on the original premise; Ripley's Game (1974) is the most widely praised of the sequels, in which Tom recruits an innocent man for a murder he should be above doing himself
- 3Buy
The Day of the Jackal
by Frederick Forsyth
A professional assassin is hired to kill Charles de Gaulle — Forsyth's procedural thriller follows the preparation of a crime in meticulous detail, giving the reader the same uncomfortable position as The Talented Mr. Ripley: rooting for the criminal against the investigators trying to stop him; where Highsmith's Ripley is a character study, Forsyth's Jackal is almost pure plot — but the identification mechanism is identical
- 4Buy
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
A group of classics students at a Vermont college commit a murder and then cover it up — Tartt's debut novel is the most widely read contemporary descendant of the Highsmith school; where Highsmith follows a single amoral protagonist, Tartt follows a group, and the identification is distributed rather than concentrated; the novel's cold, beautiful prose and its preoccupation with aesthetic experience as a defense against moral responsibility are both directly Highsmithian
- 5Buy
Patricia Highsmith: Crime Novels
by Patricia Highsmith
The Library of America edition collects Strangers on a Train, The Blunderer, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Deep Water, and The Tremor of Forgery — the best single-volume introduction to Highsmith's range; The Tremor of Forgery (1969), about an American writer in Tunisia who may have committed a murder, is considered by many to be her best novel; Strangers on a Train (1950), her debut, introduced the crime-as-collaboration premise that Hitchcock made famous
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Brighton Rock
by Graham Greene
Pinkie Brown, a seventeen-year-old gang leader in Brighton, commits murder and marries a girl who witnessed it to silence her — Greene's Catholic thriller about evil and grace; where Highsmith presents amorality as a personality type, Greene presents it as a theological condition; both novels follow criminal protagonists with complete psychological fidelity and without conventional moral framing
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A Simple Plan
by Scott Smith
Three men find a crashed plane with four million dollars in cash and make a simple plan that goes catastrophically wrong — Smith's crime novel follows Highsmith's method of inhabiting an increasingly desperate criminal perspective as the original crime compounds itself; the Midwestern American setting and the protagonist's ordinary decency (contrasted with his decisions) make it the American domestic equivalent of Ripley's Italian glamour
- 8Buy
The Killer Inside Me
by Jim Thompson
Lou Ford, a small-town Texas deputy sheriff, narrates his own escalating violence in the flat, cheerful prose of a perfectly adapted social conformist — Thompson's 1952 novel is the most disturbing precedent for Ripley in American crime fiction; where Ripley's amorality is European and aesthetic, Lou Ford's is American and populist; both narrators are expert at performing normality while doing monstrous things
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