Highsmith’s genius is to convey the gut-wrenching rise and fall of a friendship with such economy. Within just over 50 pages, we see Ripley go from unwanted interloper in Dickie’s charmed life to trusted confidant – before, just as swiftly, he is frozen out again like “an unwelcome, boring guest” who has overstayed their welcome. This culminates in one of the most exquisite passages about heartbreak – because that is what it is – in literature: “It was as if Dickie had suddenly been snatched away from him. They were not friends. They didn’t know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people that he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike.”

And so it is that, even after Dickie is at the bottom of the sea and Ripley has assumed his identity, the book balances a caper-ish quality and acid-tongued humour with an undertow of deep melancholy. Again and again, Ripley’s elan at evading the law while posing as Dickie is balanced by his self-hatred when he is required to revert to his ‘true’ self. “He hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, hated being nobody,” as Highsmith puts it towards the end. It is, most potently, a study of loneliness – that great taboo of a disease over which so much shame hangs, and that we still struggle as a society to address. A disease that renders people invisible – invisibility being both Ripley’s great skill and his great curse.

Ripley adapted

The slipperiness of Highsmith’s tone when it comes to Ripley is perhaps reflected by the range of Ripley adaptations. The Talented Mr Ripley was first adapted by the French director Réne Clément; Plein Soleil, or Purple Noon (1960), stars Alain Delon as Ripley. It’s a beautiful and superficially entertaining film but a little empty: Delon is simply too absurdly handsome to convince as a malleable ‘nobody’ and it ends with Ripley being caught, an unforgivable change which Highsmith herself declared to be “a terrible concession to so-called public morality”.

Other Ripley adaptations have included Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977) and Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game (2002), both adaptations of the third book in the Ripliad: the former stars the unlikely figure of Dennis Hopper as a kind of cowboy figure, complete with Stetson, while the latter features John Malkovich as a high-camp aesthete, pre-occupied by making souffles and practising his yoga moves as much as he is by criminality and murder.