Strangers On A Train by Patricia Highsmith

Rating 3.5⭐s

You can buy Strangers On A Train...here

You can read an article on Patricia Highsmith...here

The Blurb...

The psychologists would call it folie a deux . . .

'Bruno slammed his palms together. "Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on a train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?'''

Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno are passengers on the same train. Haines is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno a mysterious smooth-talker with a sadistic proposal: he'll murder Haines's wife if Haines will murder Bruno's father. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy finds himself trapped in Highsmith's perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, ordinary people are capable of extraordinary crimes. From this moment, almost against his conscious will, he is trapped in a nightmare of shared guilt and an insidious merging of personalities.

Our Review...

The initial concept for the novel is both intriguing and disturbing. If you met a total stranger on a train and decided to swap murder victims could you get away with it? After reading this book I think the answer is yes! with one giant proviso. You must not have any contact after your initial meeting with your murderous conspirator. Alas this does not happen here. The entitled and probably deluded Bruno immediately takes care of his side of the bargain. However the more rational Guy thinks it was all just talk, a bit of fun. The problem now is Guy cannot go to the police as they will see it very differently . He believes that they will see it as "more or less put a hit on his ex wife." Added to this quandary is the fact that Bruno is waiting for Guy to hold up his end the bargain. Bruno begins to pressure Guy into compliance all the while Bruno is becoming slowly obsessed by Guy..

Its at this stage where the two main themes come to play. Firstly the author examines the very human condition of guilt. ( see selected quotes) It wears heavy on Guy driving him down and down. If he confessed then perhaps he wouldn't feel the massive weight of remorse. Is the wretched  guilt of human conscience greater than the guilt awarded by a court of law.? While fascinating I have read this trope a few times before notably in Crime and Punishment and The Secret History. It seems a little odd that in a pre planned murder the angst of guilt should come after the action and not between decision to kill and the action of killing. In the three novels mentioned I think The Secret History's examination of guilt (albeit a group examination) is more realistic as the death isn't planned, so there no time for guilt before the death. 

Secondly the author examines man's duality (see selected quotes). Not good v evil as this is too simplistic as it conjures images of opposing sides ala Jekyll & Hide. The author suggests that opposites are not in fact opposites but sit together perfectly in the same same space. A homogenous inseparable mixture. This is reflected in the characters of Bruno and Guy who both simultaneously hate and like (possibly love?) each other. Two parts of the same whole.

It is very of its time and place. 1950s, wealthy USA. The language and culture can make the narrative seem a little dated. I think it is due an update for TV say modern, working class UK, or intercontinental could be an interesting scenario.

All in all an interesting read and I can see why it has become a modern classic.

Selected Quotes...

“People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person. There's also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.”

The tragedy was not even the first drink, because the first drink was not the first resort but the last. There’d had to be first the failure of everything else

“Society's law was lax compared to the law of conscience”

“I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.”

If You Liked This, Then You May Like This...

Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Secret  History  by Donna Tartt 

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

About The Author...

Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist who is known mainly for her psychological crime thrillers which have led to more than two dozen film adaptations over the years.

She lived with her grandmother, mother and later step-father (her mother divorced her natural father six months before 'Patsy' was born and married Stanley Highsmith) in Fort Worth before moving with her parents to New York in 1927 but returned to live with her grandmother for a year in 1933. Returning to her parents in New York, she attended public schools in New York City and later graduated from Barnard College in 1942.

Shortly after graduation her short story 'The Heroine' was published in the Harper's Bazaar magazine and it was selected as one of the 22 best stories that appeared in American magazines in 1945 and it won the O Henry award for short stories in 1946. She continued to write short stories, many of them comic book stories, and regularly earned herself a weekly $55 pay-check. During this period of her life she lived variously in New York and Mexico.

Her first suspense novel 'Strangers on a Train' published in 1950 was an immediate success with public and critics alike. The novel has been adapted for the screen three times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.

In 1955 her anti-hero Tom Ripley appeared in the splendid 'The Talented Mr Ripley', a book that was awarded the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere as the best foreign mystery novel translated into French in 1957. This book, too, has been the subject of a number of film versions. Ripley appeared again in 'Ripley Under Ground' in 1970, in 'Ripley's Game' in 1974, 'The boy who Followed Ripley' in 1980 and in 'Ripley Under Water' in 1991.

Along with her acclaimed series about Ripley, she wrote 22 novels and eight short story collections plus many other short stories, often macabre, satirical or tinged with black humour. She also wrote one novel, non-mystery, under the name Claire Morgan , plus a work of non-fiction 'Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction' and a co-written book of children's verse, 'Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda'.

She latterly lived in England and France and was more popular in England than in her native United States. Her novel 'Deep Water', 1957, was called by the Sunday Times one of the "most brilliant analyses of psychosis in America" and Julian Symons once wrote of her "Miss Highsmith is the writer who fuses character and plot most successfully ... the most important crime novelist at present in practice." In addition, Michael Dirda observed "Europeans honoured her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition represented by her own favorite writers, in particular Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gide, and Camus."

She died of leukemia in Locarno, Switzerland on 4 February 1995 and her last novel, 'Small g: a Summer Idyll', was published posthumously a month later.

Gerry Wolstenholme
July 2010