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."

***

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. 

Adventure classics – When animals turn the tables on us

“Engine Horse” from The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder

by Patricia Highsmith

***

What’s a human being to think when a friendly, taken for granted animal turns deadly? And I’m not talking about Cujo. Before Stephen King ever penned his 1981 story about a big dog turned rabid killer, Patricia Highsmith was turning her misanthropic eyes on a whole bevy of animals who took far more rational revenge on the often-vicious humans around them. Readers of Highsmith’s 1975 story collection, The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder  will never view pets, farm animals, zoos or circuses the same way again.

In common with Highsmith’s more widely-known thrillers such as The Talented Mr. Ripley, the murderers are more winning than their victims. Among the most sympathetic is the murderess du jour: Fanny, the big, slow-witted plow horse who lives only to eat, sleep and work. That is, until the day a little grey kitten enters her stable and claims her gigantic heart.

“(That day) Fanny had not done anything that she could remember except walk with the woman Bess to the water tank and back again. Fanny had a long period of munching in daylight, before she lay down with a grunt to sleep. Her vast haunch and rib cage, well covered with fat and muscle, hit the bed of hay like a carefully lowered barrel. . . The little grey kitten, which Fanny could now see more clearly, came and curled herself up in the reddish feathers behind (her) left hoof. . . The mare was somewhat pleased. Such a dainty little creature! That size, that weight that was nothing at all!”

But in the farmhouse all is not well. Farm owner Bess Gibson’s only relative, her grandson Harry and his wife have come to visit – and to talk Bess into giving him money for a business venture he has in mind.

“Gramma, it’s as simple as this,” Harry says. “I need sixty thousand dollars to buy my half. . . but if I can’t put up my part in a few days, Gramma – or can’t give a promise of the money, my chances are gone. I’ll pay you back, Gramma, naturally. But this is the chance of a lifetime!”

Bess is unimpressed, both with smooth-talking Harry and his “pretty and silly” wife, Marylou. And as Harry’s chances of wheedling money out of Bess dwindle, he begins to plan other ways to get the money he wants. “I’m thinking,” he tells Marylou, “if Gramma had something like a hip injury, you know – those things old people always get. . . she’d have to stay in a town, wouldn’t she – if her couldn’t get around?”

And Harry has thought of just the way to provide that “accident” that will force his grandmother to sell the farm – “going on a picnic, the way she says she does, you know? With the horse and wagon. . . then the wagon turns over somewhere. . . ?.

It all seems simple, that is until Harry, awkwardly attempting to harness the “engine horse” for the wagon tramples on and kills the kitten.

Picking the dead kitten up by its tail, he throws it far away into the field. And Fanny, the engine horse, sees. She at first follows Harry docilely, but her awareness of the connection between him and the kitten’s death comes, “slowly and ponderously, even more slowly than she plodded across the meadow.” And Harry, unknowingly, leads the big horse toward his own doom.

For most of her life, Fort Worth, Texas, native Highsmith remained relatively unknown in the United States, even after Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of her first novel, Strangers on a Train. When her American agent told her, as biographer Joan Schenkar reports in The Talented Miss Highsmith, that the reason her books weren’t selling in the United States was because there was “no one likeable” in them, Highsmith replied, “Perhaps it is because I don’t like anyone. My last books may be about animals.” At least one of those, The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder, was.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a November of fantasy with E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros.)

Adventure classics -- Texas in her rear view mirror

The Talented Mr. Ripley

by Patricia Highsmith

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With no language lab or foreign language movies in our small town high school, our French teacher must have been truly desperate to introduce a class of surly teenagers to some remnants of spoken French. So one day she loaded us onto a bus -- our town didn’t even have an English language movie theater at the time -- and drove us to a nearby town where she had persuaded a theater owner to give us a private showing of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Or so she thought.

What actually appeared on the screen, instead of the gentle Umbrellas, was a tale of murder from the criminal’s point of view starring heartbreakingly beautiful young Alain Delon, a movie with the bizarre English title Purple Noon. Although our embarrassed teacher asked whether we’d rather go back to class, what teens would? We settled into our seats to watch the French adaptation of Texas native Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley.

The movie had launched Delon’s career. Highsmith liked it. Or perhaps she liked Delon in it -- she dabbled in both men and women. But she quibbled over the ending, which implied that that Delon, as Highsmith character Thomas Phelps Ripley, was about to be arrested for his crime.

In fact, consummate con and sexually ambivalent murderer Ripley would go on to become one of Highsmith’s favorite characters, the protagonist of several more novels and movie adaptations.

Tom Ripley’s story opens with the request by wealthy businessman Richard Greenleaf to travel to Italy to bring his dilettante son Dickie back to New York. Although Dickie Greenleaf was little more than a casual acquaintance, out of work con artist Ripley can’t refuse, especially when Greenleaf offers to pay for Ripley’s ticket and expenses.

Ripley’s talents don’t include persuading Dickie to come home. But before the money runs out, Ripley insinuates himself into Dickie’s life too deeply to be eradicated. Raising the question of which of the two young men really is Dickie Greenleaf, and whether he has murdered Tom Ripley or Ripley has murdered him.

And of how many more people will have to die to preserve the multiple layers of secrets.

Not that I’m looking to murder anybody, but why don’t I ever get job offers like Ripley’s? Is it because I’ve been in Texas too long? Although born in Fort Worth, Highsmith moved with her mother and stepfather to New York the year she was six and never willingly returned.

Right back at you, Texas said. As biographer Joan Schenkar writes in The Talented Miss Highsmith, “when (Highsmith) offered her archives to the Harry Ransom Center at 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.”

The University of Texas may have been as squeamish about Highsmith’s talent as the respectable magazines she had applied to after graduating from Barnard College. 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.

“. . . when (she) gave her ‘criminal-hero’ Tom Ripley a charmed and parentless life, a wealthy, socially poised Alter Ego (Dickie Greenleaf), and a guilt-free modus operandi. . . she was doing just what her fellow comic book artist were doing with their Superheroes: allowing her fictional character to finesse situations she herself could only approach in wish fulfillment.”

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics turns from mystery to historical fiction with a book that bridges both genres, Elliot Peters’ A Morbid Taste for Bones.)