Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on a train by any means.
        -Strangers on a Train

The world of Patricia Highsmith is one in which the nice young man you ask to help find your son may instead kill him and take his place, where the cop you ask to help find your missing dog may turn out to be just as disturbed as the dognapper, and where the stranger you meet on a train may be a complete sociopath.  In this, her first novel, famously made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, Guy Haines wants to divorce his estranged wife, Miriam, and has finally been presented with the pretext for doing so, as she's pregnant by another man.  This will enable him to marry Ann and enjoy his burgeoning success as an architect.  But then he meets a talkative stranger named Bruno, Charles Bruno, on a train.  Bruno, the ne'er do well son of wealthy parents, wants to get rid of his father, who refuses to indulge Bruno's lazy but expensive lifestyle.  He shares his troubles with Guy who in turn makes the mistake of telling Bruno about Miriam.  As fate would have it, Bruno has an idea for the perfect murder, actually a double murder : two strangers could "swap" murders, each killing the person that the other wishes done away with, which would make the crimes seem motiveless, and therefore nearly impossible to solve.

Guy is quite naturally put off by the suggestion, though perhaps not as entirely as he should be.  No matter how much he hates Miriam, the prospect of the divorce blunts his desire to see her dead.  But when she finds out how important his pending commission is, and that his career is poised to take off, she decides not to let him go.  Meanwhile, Bruno takes matters into his own hands, quite literally, and suddenly Guy is implicated in a murder whether he wants to be or not.

The book is significantly different than the film, so even fans of the movie will be in for a new experience.  For Highsmith fans there's all the expected creepiness, from the threatening possibilities of every day life to homosexual undertones to the plasticity of identity, as Guy has essentially become Bruno by novel's end.  Whatever depths of depravity she contained within herself to draw upon, no one has ever written better about the criminally deranged mind than Patricia Highsmith.

(Reviewed:09-Jul-01)

Grade: (A-)

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