Strangers on a Train: A Novel

The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, the novel that established Patricia Highsmith as a master of noir fiction. “In this mesmerizing [novel] . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable” (Washington Post), we encounter Guy Haines, a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, and Charles Anthony Bruno, a conniving psychopath who manipulates a chance encounter with Guy into a sadistic plot to swap murders. “Some people are better off dead,” says Bruno, “like your wife and my father, for instance.” As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy becomes trapped in Patricia Highsmith’s perilous world, where under the right circumstances anyone is capable of murder. Still her most iconic novel, Strangers on a Train elicits “the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings” (Time) and the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday life.