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Buffalo News (10/Jan/1993) - Return of a master killer

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Return of a master killer

American expatriate novelist Patricia Highsmith is herself an irony. Though cautioning beginning writers to keep clear of the "suspense label," that's the very genre she has made her own, the one that brought the Texas native to international attention.

It was, after all, her very first novel, 1950's "Strangers on a Train," that film suspense master Alfred Hitchcock converted into a screen classic. And most of her 20 novels are permeated with uncertainty, anxiety and tension, basic ingredients of suspense.

But nowhere is the 71-year-old Highsmith's spellbinding talent for creating gut-clenching disquiet more evident than in her cycle of novels featuring psychopath Tom Ripley, the ice-cold smooth chameleon who began killing in 1955's "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and, five sequels later, is still at it in "Ripley Under Water."

Now living in idyllic surroundings near Paris, con man Ripley presently finds himself menaced by an enigmatic American couple that clearly suspects him of one of his past crimes and is bent on unmasking him. There follows a muted game of cat and mouse, with the chilling Ripley never more manipulative, cunning and lethal.

The Ripley novels (whose creator lives in Switzerland) have the distortion of fun-house mirrors. Evil, not virtue, triumphs. An absence of the criminal's guilt, not its presence, is explored. And Highsmith craftily evades even a scintilla of a feel-good conclusion, leaving her off-center vision intact and the return of her monster villain a certainty. Matt Helm heads south

Like the Energizer battery bunny, fictional secret agent Matt Helm keeps going and going and going.

Here he is again in "The Threateners," his 26th appearance since author Donald Hamilton introduced him in 1960. The Helm novels — all paperback originals — constitute the longest-running action/intrigue series in the suspense field.

The outdoorsy Helm is a U.S. counterspy with authority to kill — a license shared with fictional British secret agent James Bond, whose exploits helped inspire the 76-year-old Hamilton's series.

In "The Threateners," Helm mixes it up with drug kings and renegade American operatives, all intent on finding missing chapters of a Peruvian journalist's expose of a South American narcotics conspiracy against the United States.

Helm is getting long in the tooth, overly garrulous, pompous and campy. But there's nothing wrong with his libido. His wake is strewn with as many satisfied lavelies as terminated villains.