The darkly talented Patricia Highsmith

"The Talented Mr. Ripley" begins with the character dispatched to Europe to bring back a wayward son named Dickie (in purposeful parallel to Henry James' "The Ambassadors"). Ripley, though, instead befriends, or attaches himself to, that young man. Living in Dickie's world, he feels for the first time a part of the larger life around him, no longer shut out from it, granted the due he's always felt should be his. Then Dickie tires of him and tries to send him away. In a murder that is at once real and a symbolic destruction of self -- and, above all else, imminently pragmatic, as are all his solutions -- Ripley kills Dickie and assumes his identity.

We first see Ripley's imagination in full bloom as he sits aboard ship writing a letter to Dickie's father, who has funded this trip. What began as a simple thank-you note proliferates, until the table is covered with sheets of paper relating the story of his and Dickie's idyllic life together in Europe. At novel's end, circumstances force him to resume his old identity: "He hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, hated being nobody."

"The Talented Mr. Ripley" was written in six months. The other four novels -- "Ripley Under Ground," "Ripley's Game," "The Boy Who Followed Ripley," "Ripley Under Water" -- appeared over a period of 36 years. Forever too adamantine to repeat herself or to court commercial success, Highsmith used them not to do dirty dozens on the original, as so often occurs in a series, but to dig ever deeper into Ripley's mind and vacant soul. The surface of his life may seem calm, but underneath roils the same stormy gulf -- and the surface itself is a magnificently constructed lie.

In these books, Highsmith is like a fine improviser, playing the melody then going ever farther afield, always reaching, out to the edge and back, looking to see what all is in there.

By the second novel, "Ripley Under Ground," set six years after the first, Ripley has married into a wealthy French family and occupies a fine home, Belle Ombre, in the French countryside, where one pastime is puttering about in his garden and another is dealing in art forgeries. Threatened with exposure, he turns again to murder.

"Ripley's Game" begins with a slight at a social gathering, escalates into murder when Ripley jokingly recommends the slighter as a contract killer, then becomes a full-tilt thriller as Ripley joins forces with the surprise assassin against Mafia henchmen.