Texas writer smackdown: The lure of antiheroes

 As promised, here's a smackdown -- classic Texas writer Patricia Highsmith with The Talented Mr. Ripley vs. modern writer May Cobb's All the Little Houses.

The Talented Mr. Ripley opens with a wealthy businessman Richard Greenleaf's request to Ripley to bring his son Dickie, then living the life of a dilletante writer/painter in Italy, back home to New York. Although Dickie Greenleaf was little more than a casual acquaintance, out-of-work con artist Tom Ripley can't refuse, especially when the elder Greenleaf offers to pay for his travel and expenses.

Ripley becomes enamored with Dickie's trust fund lifestyle. He soon gives up any attempt to lure Dickie back home, instead insinuating himself too deeply in Dickie's hospitality to be eradicated. How to continue the life he covets when the elder Greenleaf's expense account runs out? There's only enough trust fund for one young man, raising the question of which of the two is really Dickie, and whether he has murdered Ripley out of desperation. Or is it the other way around?

And how many more people will have to die to preserve the story's multiple layers of secrecy?

When I was in high school in a small East Texas town, the school's French teacher persuaded a local movie theater owner to give her class a private showing of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Or so she thought. 

Instead, what appeared on the screen was a tale of murder from the criminal's point of view, a movie with the bizarre title (in English translation) of Purple Noon. Our embarrassed teacher asked if we'd rather go back to class. But what teens would? We settled into our seats to watch the French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Who would have thought Highsmith, author of such murderous masterpieces as Ripley, with its multiple film/streaming offshoots, and Strangers on a Train (adapted to cinematic fame by Alfred Hitchcock and more loosely adapted later as When You Kiss a Stranger) was a Texan?

Fort Worth-born Highsmith left the state at age six when her mother and stepfather moved to New York. She never willingly returned. Back at you, Texas said, returning the snub. As biographer Joan Schenkar writes in The Talented Miss Highsmith, "when (she) offered her archives to the University of Texas at Austin, she received a letter . . . suggesting the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars for her papers. 'The price of a used car,' Pat said bitterly and refused to let Texas have her literary bones."

Texas may have been as squeamish about Highsmith's talent as the magazines she first applied to after college graduation. Unable to get a job at what were considered respectable publications, she accepted an offer to write scripts for Cinema Comics.

In the early 1940's, "the entire comics milieu -- authors, illustrators, publishers and the improbable characters they were creating," Schenkar writes, "was alive with the same collection of crooks and cons, artists with secret identities and heroes with Alter Egos, with which the talented Miss Highsmith would later populate so much of her fiction."

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So, how do Highsmith's rich, would-be-rich, devious, sexually ambiguous characters and bizarre plot twists stand up to those of modern Texas noir writer May Cobb's All the Little Houses?

Cobb shot to fame with her earlier, "present-day" thriller, The Hunting Wives, now streaming on Netflix (as is TTMR's latest incarnation, titled simply Ripley). Unlike Highsmith, Cobb revels in her Texas roots. Although TV-land tends to divide Texan in prairie and desert, Cobb lays her tales in the piney woods of East Texas. Fittingly, it's the region where dirt-poor Depression-era farmers suddenly shot to riches from the black gold burbling beneath their worn-out cotton fields.

In All the Little Houses, Cobb shifts the story setting to the 1980's, the era in which she was growing up in the one-time roughneck oil town of Longview, Texas. The book's title riffs on the popular '80's TV series
, Little House on the Prairie. But in Cobb's story, the vibe is far less wholesome, with a mean teen named for adolescent Little House villainess, Nellie.

In an interview, Cobb called herself a lover of the whole '80's decadent era, where big hair and big shoulder pads went hand in hand with classism snobbery and a heaping helping of homophobia. 

As well, setting the story in pre-internet times mean when things went wrong, as they so often do in the book, there's no way to call for help.

Mean girl Nellie and her bootstrap mom Charleigh are at the top of the Longview social heap, thanks to Charleigh's marriage to the richest man in town. But though Charleigh's beauty won her rich (and equally handsome) husband's heart, the longer-term wealthy look down on her nouveau status. And Nellie, who inherited none of her parents' looks, can only find a pretense of love by having her mom bribe boys to date her.

When Jane, the gorgeous new girl in town, enters high school just before summer break, even money can't buy Nellie popularity.

High school boys go for Jane, but their moms -- at least the rich ones -- lust after Jane's sexually ambivalent dad. Meanwhile, Charleigh's best -- probably only -- friend, closeted gay decorator Jackson, yearn to escape the insular East Texas vibe for his dream city of San Francisco.

All the Little Houses makes no bones about just how bad things can get, letting readers know early no that somebody -- or bodies -- gonna die. (Personally, I had a list of at least half a dozen characters I'd gladly see sacrificed.) But who the victim (or victims) will be, who the murderer, how and why, will still astonish.