“Ripley’s Game” (1974) is the third book in the series about the most famous character of an American novelist. The killer “only by necessity,” a gourmet and an aesthete, polite and perfectly good-natured Ripley is nothing like an ordinary butcher. He lives in a world where fiction and reality are indistinguishable, where the boundaries between good and evil are very conditional, and where crime is a game— a chess match, harmless entertainment between playing the harpsichord and gardening; a kind of puzzle, only the “heads” at stake are always real.
Like the other books of the Ripley series, “Ripley’s Game” was a success with readers and was translated into many languages; based on the novel, in 1977 Wim Wenders made the film “The American Friend,” in which Dennis Hopper played Ripley. And in 2002 a new film of the same name was released with John Malkovich in the leading role.