Crime Wave Book Club with Andrei & Patrick

Join McNally Jackson for a walk on the wiiiiild side of crime fiction. We’ll tour through the hardboiled classics of Chandler, Cain and Hammett; acquaint ourselves with contemporary masters like Ellroy and Mosley; international noir in translation; the fractured psyches of Thompson and Highsmith; even genre-bending experiments in horror and science-fiction!

We’ve got something to satisfy any and all tastes for all you darkly depraved delinquents.

This month we’ll discuss Patricia Highsmith’s well crafted thriller with a queer twist, The Talented Mr. Ripley.

[A] masterwork of American noir.…Scene by masterful scene, sentence by sentence, with each disturbing thought and memory, Highsmith reveals how Ripley’s psyche veers out of bounds, a slow drip punctuated by shocking jumps.— Carole V. Bell, NPR

Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic… has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.— Robert Towers – New York Review of Books

It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.” Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. “Sinister and strangely alluring” (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.

Contact Genay, at bookclubs@mcnallyjackson.com with any questions.