EricCWelch

Shades of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley series. Morris Duckworth teaches English to recalcitrant Italians, most of them wealthy. He thinks he’s in love with a seventeen-year-old heiress, Massimina — if that’s possible; or at least she’s infatuated with him. Her parents see through his pretentious lies related to a fictitious job he pretends to have and forbid their daughter from seeing him. Massimina meets him one day and they decide to run off, Morris pretending to send her cards back to her parents so they won’t worry. He has a more subtle plan. He’s tired of being penurious, so he contrives a scheme to pretend to kidnap her. Morris’s previous attempts at petty larceny (stealing a bronze statue from the house of a boy he tutors) and a foray into blackmail (he steals a briefcase and finds a diary that refers to two young women — he assumes the owner is having an affair with the two so he threatens to reveal the information to the man’s wife) both are dismal failures (the bronze statue is a minor copy — he missed the really valuable piece-- and the two women turn out to be the man’s daughters. Morris has the amoral psyche of Ripley, without Tom’s skill — or luck. When Massimina makes friends with an English girl and her Italian boyfriend, Morris kills the boyfriend who has seen Massimina’s picture in the newspaper with a story about the kidnapping. He has to kill the English girl as well when she stumbles on the scene shortly afterwards. Like Tom, Morris seems devoid of sexual interest, the whole idea just simmering in the background. Gradually, events conspire to push him into a corner. There is a sequel that will be on my list.