Tag Archives: murder

Augustine’s Lizards: On Temptation
And honestly, at first blush I was not sympathetic to Augustine’s self-reproach for watching the lizards and the flies. Let yourself watch the animals, my dude. But as my week away from home and church drew to a close, and I thought about that narrow gate through which I had allowed any diversion to come and how eagerly I wanted to go find those diversions anyway, however pointless or even annoying they might be, I started to understand him better.

The Many Faces of Mr. Ripley
But these murder novels are different inasmuch as the murders are all somehow about something. Something that real-life murders are almost never about. Tom Ripley and Richard Papen are interlopers in more leisured classes than their own, and most readers probably know what that’s like. It can prompt envy, certainly, but also the insight that one knows things that they don’t know, that there are skills they’ve never had to develop.