Editing Patricia Highsmith (section)

===The "Ripliad"===

Wilson calls Highsmith's first [[Tom Ripley]] novel, ''The Talented Mr. Ripley'', "One of her most powerful and celebrated novels."<ref name="Wilson2003" />{{Rp|page=191}} She went on to write four sequels (in the series sometimes called the "Ripliad"<ref name="Bradford2021" />{{Rp|page=238}}) and by 1989, according to Bradford, "Ripley had become for her the equivalent of [[Conan Doyle]]'s Holmes, even Shakespeare's Hamlet, the figure who defined her as a writer."<ref name="Bradford2021" />{{Rp|page=95}} Critic Anthony Hilfer sees Ripley as an exemplar of the "protean or perpetually self-inventing man" who can transform himself into anyone by mimicking their external traits.<ref name="Peters2011" />{{Rp|pages=6–7}}

Highsmith wrote that in her first Ripley novel she was showing, "the unequivocal triumph of evil over good and rejoicing in it. I shall make my readers rejoice in it too."<ref name="Schenkar2009" />{{Rp|page=161}} Bradford argues that one of the strengths of the first Ripley novel is that it implicates its readers in an amoral world: "There was a general consensus that while the main character was vile and immoral Highsmith had somehow insulated him from the reader's inclination to judge."<ref name="Bradford2021" />{{Rp|page=118}}

Tom Ripley has been variously described by commentators as "repellent and fascinating,"<ref name="Bradford2021" />'''{{Rp|page=118}}''' "a cold blooded killer with a taste for the finer things in life," and "an amoral but charming psychopath."<ref name="Wilson2003" /> {{Rp|pages=6, 192}} A critic for the ''Times Literary Supplement'' noted that in the second Ripley novel, ''Ripley Under Ground'' (1970), Ripley's new wealth had not made him more normal, but had turned him into "a contented psychopath."<ref name="Wilson2003" />{{Rp|page=293}} Ripley is a serial killer who always gets away with his crimes. Shenkar believes "Ripley becomes more successful (and less interesting) with each new Ripley novel."<ref name="Schenkar2009" />{{Rp|page=164}} Critic Noel Mawer argues that in the later novels Ripley becomes less a "psychotic in his world of delusion" and more an "amoral, unfeeling sociopath who feels that murder is simply a necessity to protect what...[he] feels he has earned and deserved."<ref name="Mawer2004" />{{Rp|page=20}}