Meet Tom Ripley, Oh, wait, we've met him before, four times in fact.
And what is Tom up to these days? Oh, well, the usual stuff - a bit of facilitating of the sale of forged art, a few odd jobs for his underworld contact Reeves Minot, but mainly just hanging out at Belle Ombre, his rambling country house just south of Paris, with his lovely and uncurious wife Héloïse, bimbling down to the local bar-tabac occasionally for a demi-pression, and keeping an eye out for anyone who might be in the vicinity of the village asking awkward questions about the series of mysterious disappearances and deaths that have happened in Tom's vicinity over the years.
David Pritchard soon makes contact with Ripley and makes it pretty clear that he is indeed here because of Ripley, and alludes to some contact with some people on the periphery of the complex web of deceit associated with the art forgery scam, in particular the wife of Thomas Murchison, the art collector who Ripley was unfortunately obliged to bludgeon to death with a bottle of vintage wine lest he blow the whole scheme wide open. Murchison is the victim Ripley is most concerned about, as he dumped his body in a canal only a few miles up the road.
Héloïse, having nothing as tedious as earning a living to do to occupy her time, decides to swan off to Morocco for a few weeks, and Tom joins her for the first part of the trip, only to find, somewhat bizarrely, that Pritchard has followed them, seemingly just with the intention of causing mischief. Tom is not really a man to be trifled with like this and attempts to warn Pritchard off by beating him up.
Ripley returns to France, with Héloïse still exploring Morocco with a friend, and decides to take advantage of her absence by attending to the Pritchard situation. And not before time, as Pritchard has now chartered a boat and is dragging the local canals looking for Murchison. Tom enlists the help of one of his English art forgery sidekicks, Ed Banbury, who travels out to the house to assist. Shortly after this a wet rope-tied canvas package is left at the gates of Tom's house, and when he and Ed examine it it turns out to be mainly human bones with a few gobbets of jellified flesh still attached. Ripley identifies it as Murchison by a distinctive ring, which he pockets, and then attends to the business of disposing of the remains. And what better way to dispose of them than by sneaking round to the Pritchards' house in the dead of night and dropping the bundle into the large pond in their front garden?
It's a pretty simple plan, but it pays off in ways Ripley couldn't have foreseen when the Pritchards, alerted by the big SPLOSH from the front garden, come outside, try to hook whatever's been dropped into the pond, and in the process fall in and drown.
Pretty convenient for Tom, non? He's not completely in the clear, though, as Pritchard had informed the police that he'd deposited a package at Tom's house. Luckily, since no-one else (apart from Ed, who's saying nothing) saw it, Tom can just affect a baffled ignorance, ply the local flics with a glass of vin rouge when they come round asking questions, do some mutual tutting about crazy foreigners with their crazy ways, and then send them on their way.
And so, as we knew he would be, Tom is in the clear, with, as before, a faint whiff of suspicion around him but nothing concrete. Héloïse, by now returned from Morocco, is a bit vexed at the police coming to her house but is also very disinclined to ask too many questions of Tom and very happy to resume their comfortable life.
This is the fifth and last book in the Ripley series, published in 1991; it's also the last novel published during Patricia Highsmith's lifetime (she died in 1995 and one further novel was published posthumously). What I would say about the series is that the first three books are much better than the last two, and there's a suspicion that she returned to the series the last two times out of either a shortage of other creative ideas or a knowledge that Ripley books were sure to sell. This is never less than entertaining, though, and it's fun just to spend time in Tom's company in the knowledge that he will never suffer harm or consequences for his actions, still less experience any regret or remorse as a result of them. All of those actions in this book are historical ones, specifically the murder of Thomas Murchison in Ripley Under Ground; while Tom might be somewhat morally culpable for the deaths of the Pritchards no-one would expect a charge of murder to stick.
A few obvious criticisms: Pritchard's motivations are never satisfactorily explained, Ed Banbury seems remarkably sanguine about getting directly involved in the direct consequences of Tom's murderous activities (actual human remains and all), and the Pritchards' manner of death is wholly implausible (how could they both fall in? how deep can a garden pond be?). But it all bowls along very entertainingly, even when not very much is happening (which is most of the time).
This completes my reading of the Ripley series, over the course of almost exactly fifteen years since the first book. As mentioned here, that means it joins a select group of novel sequences which appear in their entirety on this blog. Incomplete ones which may join the list in future are Peter Matthiessen's Watson trilogy (one to go) and the just-started Patrick Melrose sequence by Edward St. Aubyn. I suspect it's less likely that I'll ever complete either Anthony Powell's A Dance To The Music Of Time sequence or Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. But hey, give it a few years and I might be looking for things to do during my retirement, so you never know.
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