On Thursday, Netflix released the latest adaptation of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 tale of a skilled imposter who’s dispatched to Europe to bring back the spoiled son of an American businessman. (Deception, sexual intrigue, and murder ensue.) The Netflix series, simply titled “Ripley,” is at least the seventh film or TV version of Highsmith’s story, and at least the fourth since Highsmith’s death, in 1995. “Filmmakers have always been drawn to Highsmith’s novels,” the contributor Susannah Clappwrote inThe New Yorker, shortly before the release of an earlier Ripley film, starring Matt Damon, in 1999. The first screen adaptation of a Highsmith story—“Strangers on a Train,” from 1951—was directed by no less a titan than Hitchcock, but even the future “Psycho” filmmaker felt compelled to water down the ending. (Highsmith, in her twenties when she wrote it, attracted critical support from Truman Capote, but still received six rejections before finally finding a publisher.) The novelist’s dark world view was at least partly drawn from her own life—Clapp shares an unsettling anecdote about Highsmith’s mother and turpentine—and the sensibility likely limited her sales. But Highsmith’s outlook clearly resonated with tastemakers, and it continues to do so, as the latest adaptation attests. Highsmith herself doesn’t seem to have minded the smaller audience. “I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial,” she observed, “for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done.” | 
