The Boy Who Followed Ripley was published by Lippincott & Crowell in 1980 and occupies a unique position in the Ripley sequence. It is the novel in which Highsmith allows Tom something approaching human warmth — a development that makes the book simultaneously the most accessible and the most unsettling of the five Ripley novels. Tom’s capacity for affection, when it emerges, is more disturbing than his violence, because it reveals that his amorality is not a deficit but a choice.
The Novel
Frank Pierson is sixteen years old, the son of a recently deceased American food-processing magnate. He has pushed his wheelchair-bound father off a cliff — an act motivated by complex emotions that include mercy, resentment, and the simple desire to be free. Haunted by guilt and unable to confide in anyone, Frank travels to France and attaches himself to Tom Ripley, whose criminal reputation he has somehow discovered.
Tom recognises immediately what Frank has done. Rather than recoiling, he takes the boy under his protection — feeding him, housing him at Belle Ombre, listening to his halting confessions, and offering a form of absolution that no legitimate authority could provide. “You did what you felt was right,” Tom tells him. “That’s all anyone can do.”
The relationship between Tom and Frank is the novel’s emotional centre, and Highsmith renders it with surprising tenderness. Tom becomes a surrogate father — ironic, given that Frank killed his actual father — and the bond between them is genuine, if founded on shared criminality. Tom enjoys Frank’s company, worries about his safety, and ultimately risks his own security to rescue him from kidnappers in Berlin.
The Berlin Sequences
The novel’s middle section moves to West Berlin (this is 1980, and the Wall is still standing), where Frank is kidnapped by criminals who demand ransom from the Pierson fortune. Tom’s rescue operation takes him into the divided city’s underworld — transvestite bars, safe houses, the grey zone between East and West where criminal networks operated freely.
These Berlin scenes give the novel a Cold War atmosphere unusual for Highsmith, who typically set her work in the more temperate environments of France and Italy. The divided city serves as a metaphor for Frank’s psychological condition — split between guilt and relief, childhood and adulthood, the legitimate world and Tom’s criminal one.
Themes
The Boy Who Followed Ripley is fundamentally about the transmission of values between generations. Frank seeks out Tom because he needs someone who will understand what he has done without condemning it. Tom provides this understanding — but in doing so, he also models a way of being in the world that normalises violence and eliminates moral constraint.
The novel asks whether Tom is saving Frank or damning him. Is he providing necessary absolution to a boy destroyed by guilt, or is he recruiting another soul into his particular form of damnation? Highsmith, characteristically, refuses to answer.
The theme of patricide connects to the earlier novels’ Oedipal concerns. Frank has already done what Tom’s admirers (Walter Stackhouse in The Blunderer, Jonathan Trevanny in Ripley’s Game) only dreamed of — he has killed the father. Now he needs a new father, and Tom fills that role with terrifying ease.
Publication and Editions
The first edition was published by Lippincott & Crowell, New York, in 1980. First printings are identified by:
- Lippincott & Crowell imprint on title page
- “First Edition” stated on copyright page
- Price of $10.95 on dust jacket front flap
- Cloth binding with jacket
The UK edition was published by Heinemann (London, 1980).
Reviews were positive, with critics noting the novel’s surprising emotional depth and the complex father-son dynamic. The novel is generally considered the most psychologically rich of the Ripley sequels.
Collecting The Boy Who Followed Ripley
First edition (Lippincott & Crowell, 1980): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $150–$400. The publisher’s imprint (Lippincott & Crowell was a short-lived merger) gives the book a bibliographic curiosity value.
UK first edition (Heinemann, 1980): $100–$250 for fine copies.
Signed copies are uncommon but somewhat more available than signed copies of the earlier Ripley novels, as Highsmith made occasional European appearances in the 1980s. Signed firsts bring $800–$2,000.
As part of the complete Ripley sequence, this title is essential for collectors assembling the full five-novel set. Individual copies are less sought than the first three Ripley titles but benefit from the overall strength of the Ripley market.