Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...moved to France in part to get in touch with his roots--he was born in Paris and lived there until he was six. But he's also working on eBay's expansion plans, making regular visits to the company's London and Berlin offices to give advice and plot strategy...
...discuss Minghella's adaptation of the Ripley book--how he has deepened it, enriched it, possibly distorted it--we'll be spilling a bean or two about the plot, which is, anyway, well known from the novel (published in 1955 and still in print) and a 1960 French film version, Rene Clement's Purple Noon (which is on video and was rereleased in U.S. theaters in 1996). You're welcome to see the new movie first--it should be on every naughty child's Christmas wish list. Then come back and we'll talk...
...first was to let the bad guy get away with his crimes. All mystery writers are murderers; they get into the mind, under the skin, of a killer, if only to determine how the foul deed can be accomplished. Then, typically, they bring in a detective to unravel the plot and cuff the culprit. Highsmith simply ditched the civilized pretense of justice avenged. She tore the final, comeuppance chapter out of Ripley's story, left him giddy with triumph--and let him flourish in four more books. The snake, having shed its old skin, slithers away; the reader is both...
...tone of high, dark comedy. Tom kills--Dickie, Dickie's pal Freddie Miles, an American art lover, a bunch of mafiosi--as much for the game of eluding capture as for motives of profit or survival. In Ripley's Game he gets an ailing man involved in a murder plot only because the man once spoke abruptly to Tom. Then, when the man desperately tries to kill a Mafia goon, who shows up to help but Ripley? Good deeds or bad, they're just caprices for a gentleman rogue...
...Thursday also issued a mail-bomb alert against any unsolicited mail bearing a postmark from Frankfurt, Germany, while a man was arrested in the Bahamas after he tried to flee when questioned about suspicious equipment he was trying to carry aboard a plane. And the specter of a bomb plot by Canada-based Algerian exiles grew Thursday as a Vermont prosecutor presented evidence linking Lucia Garofalo, arrested Sunday trying to cross into the U.S. along with an Algerian man, to terrorist organizations...