Crime Uncovered: Antihero - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783205199 ISBN 13: 9781783205196

Verlag: University of Chicago Pr., 2015

Inhaltsangabe

There are few figures as captivating as the antihero: the character we can't help but root for, even as we turn away in revulsion from many of the things they do. What is it that draws us to characters like Breaking Bad's Walter White, Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, and Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander even as we decry the trail of destruction they leave in their wake?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Fiona Peters is a senior lecturer in English and cultural studies at Bath Spa University, where Rebecca Stewart is a lecturer in the School of Humanities and Cultural Studies.

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Antihero

By Fiona Peters, Rebecca Stewart

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-519-6

Contents

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION, 7, 
CASE STUDIES, 17, 
INTEROGATION, 159, 
REPORTS, 169, 
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES, 216, 

CHAPTER 1

CASE STUDIES

18
TOM RIPLEY AND VIC VAN ALLEN
Fiona Peters

34
THE PUNISHER
Kent Worcester

46
SONCHAI JITPLEECHEEP
Nicole Kenley

58
LOU FORD
Gill Jamieson

72
TONY SOPRANO
Abby Bentham

86
RAY DONOVAN
Gareth Hadyk-DeLodder

100
WALTER WHITE AND DEXTER MORGAN
Katherine Robbins

112
ALICE MORGAN
Sabrina Gilchrist

124
SARAH LINDEN
Joseph Walderzak

136
STEPHANIE DELACOUR
Mary Marley Latham

144
RUST COHLE
Isabell Groβe

TOM RIPLEY AND VIC VAN ALLEN

NATIONALITY: AMERICAN / CREATOR: PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

Patricia Highsmith's antiheroes

Fiona Peters

To the general reader of crime fiction, Patricia Highsmith is best known for her urbane and guilt free antihero, Tom Ripley. The author always saw him as her alter-ego, what she would have liked to have been freed from: the vagaries of guilt, conscience and passion, 'afflictions' she suffered a surfeit of throughout her life. The character stayed with her for many years after his 'birth', when, staying in Positano in 1954, she spotted a young man, quite alone, walking along the beach first thing in the morning. The feeling of solitude, the exclusion from the world of others that she perceived in him stayed with her:

Then I noticed, a solitary young man in shorts and sandals with a towel flung over his shoulder, making his way alone along the beach from right to left [...] I could just about see that his hair was straight and darkish. There was an element of pensiveness about him, maybe unease. And why was he alone?

(Wilson 2003: 195)

Highsmith's most popular novel, and the one for which she is best known, The Talented Mr Ripley, was published in 1955, with Ripley Under Ground in 1970, Ripley's Game in 1974, The Boy Who Followed Ripley in 1980, and finally Ripley Under Water in 1991, four years before her death. She often contrasted Tom Ripley with her other 'heroes', for several reasons. While the heroes of the majority of her other novels suffer anguish due to their sense of guilt, even if they do not actually carry out actions that they should even feel guilty for, for the most part they don't 'get away with it' either legally or morally. Tom Ripley gets away with it in both senses: 'Things go wrong in life, justice is not done and people sort of get used to it. Maybe Ripley is appealing because people like to imagine that somebody can get away with it all the time' (Stewart 1992).

Tom Ripley's truly radical, disturbing and anti-human nature can only, I would argue, be found within the pages of her novels – the various film versions, including the best known The Talented Mr Ripley, directed by Anthony Minghella in 1999, whatever their individual merits, dilute the merciless potential of Highsmith's favourite character. This chapter will examine the ways in which Tom Ripley exemplifies the modern antihero but it will not concentrate solely on him. The 'other' protagonists who populate the rest of Highsmith's extensive oeuvre are, I would argue, antiheroes in very different but no less interesting ways. The chapter will firstly explore Tom Ripley as the exemplar of the antihero, then move on to examine how another of Highsmith's protagonists, Vic Van Allen in Deep Water (1957), while in many respects appears to be diametrically opposed to Tom Ripley, nonetheless can also be classified as a 'Highsmithian antihero'.

Tom Ripley

From the very first lines of The Talented Mr Ripley, as soon as the reader is introduced to Tom, the sense of him being a little 'off', imbues the text:

Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom walked faster. Tom had noticed him five minutes ago, eyeing him carefully from a table, as if he weren't quite sure, but almost.

(Highsmith 1955: 5; original emphasis)

Tom's 'life of crime' and antihero status is not, at this stage, very advanced, but he already watches his back, perceiving any stranger to be after him. He is rather listlessly trying to make money from a tax scam; pretending to be a tax inspector he phones randomly chosen 'victims' and scares them into paying him cheques for tax he convinces them that they owe. A financial drawback of this scheme is that he uses a false name and so cannot cash the cheques; thus Highsmith demonstrates Tom's propensity for making malicious mischief even if it induces anxiety in him; he simply cannot stop himself creating malign mischief. She highlights his sense of fear as he is approached in a New York street by Mr Greenleaf, who, believing him to be a friend of his son Richard, wants to suggest that Tom might go to Europe to attempt to persuade Richard to return home to New York, his family and the lucrative family business. Before Mr Greenleaf speaks to him, Tom automatically views him as a threat, a representative of the law, about to arrest him:

Was that the kind they sent on a job like this, maybe to start chatting to you in a bar and then bang! – the hand on the shoulder, the other hand displaying a policeman's badge. Tom Ripley, you're under arrest. Tom watched the door.

(Highsmith 1955: 9; original emphasis)

The opening chapters of The Talented Mr Ripley, set in New York, are vital for establishing Tom's amorality, his attraction towards petty crime, and his feelings of superiority and resentment towards the world around him – a world in which he has not had the luck of birth that Dickie Greenleaf enjoyed, the advantages of good schooling and money that allow Dickie to treat those gifts lightly and leave his obligations to go to Europe on a whim to pursue his fantasy of becoming a painter. Highsmith herself was very aware that this character trait is disturbing, yet also seductive and appealing:

I make Ripley amoral, and naturally this disturbs an ordinary person. It would disturb me. It's as if somebody steals from my house or anybody's house, and thinks nothing of it. Ripley doesn't suffer as much as the rest of us do from the knowledge that he has done something wrong.

(Stewart 1992)

It is difficult to imagine that the Tom of the first section of The Talented Mr Ripley becomes what the reader encounters at the beginning of Ripley Under Ground – the owner of an aesthetically pleasing house, Belle Ombre, situated near Paris, and moreover living there with his wife Heloise and trusty housekeeper Madame Annette. Belle Ombre means beautiful shadow, a name that is arguably a deliberate nod to Tom Ripley's shadowy existence, on the fringes of the bourgeois society in which he lives, always just outside of it, shadowing it, never sure if he is going to be unmasked as the killer that he became in The Talented Mr Ripley. This sense of non-belonging and outsider status does not unduly perturb him; as Highsmith indicates, he has so far 'got away with it' in two senses, both the legal sense insofar as his masquerade as Dickie Greenleaf and the murders he carried out have not been...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Pr.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783205199
• ISBN 13: 9781783205196
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 222
• Herausgeber: Peters Fiona, Stewart Rebecca
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland