Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train

Strangers on a Train, published in 1950, was Patricia Highsmith’s first novel. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 film adaptation is regarded as one of his best movies and is better remembered than Highsmith’s novel.

Both the novel and the movie start with the same setup. Two men, total strangers, meet on a train. Guy is an up-and-coming architect. Bruno is a self-pitying drunk. Guy has a huge problem with his wife Miriam. He wants a divorce so he can marry rich girl Anne Faulkner. Miriam isn’t just being difficult about the divorce, she is also deliberately sabotaging Guy’s career. After a few drinks Guy tells Bruno all his troubles and it’s obvious that as long as Miriam is alive Guy has no chance of either personal happiness or professional success.

Bruno hates his father. He believes his father is preventing him from getting his hands on money that Bruno believes is rightfully his. Bruno blames his father is responsible for all his problems. He would like to kill his father.

Bruno comes up with an ingenious plan. If he kills Guy’s wife and Guy kills Bruno’s father it would be a perfect murder setup. No-one would suspect either of them of killing someone with whom they had absolutely no connection. Guy dismisses the idea contemptuously. Unfortunately Bruno convinces himself that Guy really would like to have his wife murdered and since Bruno likes Guy he decides to do him a favour by killing Miriam.

In the Hitchcock movie this setup is used as the basis for one of the great suspense thriller movies. The novel however is not a suspense story. It falls into the category of the psychological crime novel, in which the author tries to take the reader inside the mind of a murderer. This is a type of crime fiction that I personally dislike. I’m not interested in incredibly detailed dissections of a murderer’s every single action and every single emotion and in this case Highsmith’s dissection is incredibly detailed and incredibly long-winded. I’m also always rather sceptical of the claims of this type of crime fiction to be psychologically realistic.

The key to Bruno’s character is that he has never grown up. He has never taken any adult responsibility and he has never had an adult emotional relationship. In fact he has never had a single adult inter-personal relationship with any person.

Bruno isn’t stuck in perpetual adolescence. He’s stuck permanently in early childhood. His fixation on his mother is what you would expect from an eight-year-old. His hatred of his father is a childish hatred. His feelings towards Guy are similarly childish. He develops a childish hero-worship of Guy. And Bruno has the extreme self-centredness of a small child.

Guy’s problem is his passivity. He drifts through his life without ever taking charge of it and he has a tendency to do what people want him to do.

I wasn’t totally convinced by the psychological motivations of Bruno or of Guy. I felt they were a bit muddled and stretched credibility a little. A bigger problem for me was that I really didn’t like either character and I found it difficult to feel any real investment in their fates.

The plot of the first half of the novel is almost identical to that of the movie but in the second half of the story the novel and the movie diverge radically.

This is also an inverted mystery in the sense that the mystery plot hinges not on the revelation of the identity of the murderer (which we already know) but on the means by which the crime is solved. In this case the solution comes about through a combination of a dogged private detective and a long series of mistakes on the part of the murderer. Even a perfect murder can go wrong if the murderer is careless and clumsy and reckless in the aftermath of the murder.

I’m hesitant to recommend this novel because I personally did not enjoy it very much at all, but I’m also hesitant about advising anyone to avoid it. If you enjoy psychological crime novels you might enjoy this one a lot more than I did.

I’ve reviewed Hitchcock’s film adaptation Strangers on a Train (1951).