‘This coast is saturated’: Italian village braces for post-Ripley crowds

Posted on April 12, 2024 by Admin

Netflix hit series based on Patricia Highsmith novel brings prospect of surge in visitors to Atrani area of Amalfi coast

When Andrew Scott’s eponymous character in the hit new Netflix series Ripley travels from Naples to the village of Atrani, the rickety bus has the road almost to itself; a solitary Vespa passes going the other way. When he tracks down Dickie Greenleaf at the beach, the rich American and his girlfriend are the only people sunbathing on the pristine sands.

Visitors to the Amalfi coast today will note the contrast. Unlike in 1961, the road between Positano and Salerno is now known as much for its traffic jams as for the views. Atrani may be less busy than its neighbour Amalfi, but in summer its beach is taken over by rows of umbrellas and sunbeds. A small area, perhaps a fifth of the space, is public spiaggia libera.

Twisted brilliance: Patricia Highsmith at 100

Posted on January 9, 2021 by Admin

Forbidden desires, strange obsessions and a singular talent for suspense... Carmen Maria Machado on the dark allure of the writer behind Ripley

Read The World’s Champion Ball-Bouncer, an unpublished Highsmith short story

There has always been something fundamentally difficult about Patricia Highsmith. And not difficult in the way that most people mean it: ironic, quirky, feminist (“Well-behaved women rarely make history”, and so on). I mean truly, legitimately difficult; a well of darkness with no discernible bottom.

Which is not to say that she wasn’t, in her own way, endearing. She was, after all, a genius, a bona fide eccentric. She loved animals, particularly snails, which she kept by the hundred as pets and took to parties clinging to a leaf of lettuce in her handbag. Writer and critic Terry Castle describes how she once “smuggled her cherished pet snails through French customs by hiding six or eight of them under each bosom”. She was famous for her wit and wicked sense of humour, and she wrote compellingly of loneliness and empathetically about disempowered housewives and children.

Making a killing: what can novels teach us about getting away with murder?

Posted on March 11, 2020 by Admin

From Agatha Christie to Gillian Flynn, readers love an untraceable method or a villain who wins. Author Peter Swanson says there are eight examples of the perfect murder

Is there such a thing as a perfect murder? In real life, the answer is probably yes, though how would we know about it? Perfection demands that the murder be unsolvable, maybe even unrecorded – a victim disappearing off the face of the earth, a body never found, a killer never caught. In our world of forensic science and DNA evidence, the perfect murder must be as rare as a reclusive celebrity.

But we have fiction, and this is where we find an abundance of perfect murder attempts. I say attempts because the allure of most detective fiction hinges on the existence of an investigator – a Holmes, a Poirot, a Lisbeth Salander – who is smarter than the smartest of criminals. The perfect murder – like a perfect sonnet or a perfect roast chicken – is an ideal that can be approached but never entirely reached. Detectives, and storytelling tradition, get in the way.

When I set out to write a book in which a bookseller publishes a blog about his favourite fictional murders, only to find out that someone else is using the list as a blueprint for real crimes, I knew that part of the process of writing was going to be a whole lot of reading. So I set out to find a definitive list of perfect crimes and came up with a final tally of eight (or rather, my narrator Malcolm Kershaw did).

Christie's use of thallium as a fatal poison in The Pale Horse caused a brief uptick in the toxin’s presence in real-life crime