The Bookshelf: Crisscross

Published 2:00 pm Sunday, July 9, 2023

At the age of 29, Patricia Highsmith penned “Strangers on a Train,” a book that seasoned authors twice her age would have given their eyeteeth to have written. It was her debut novel.

The premise: Two men who are total strangers meet on a train; they strike up a conversation. Guy is a high-flying architect in the midst of a protracted divorce; Bruno is a smooth-talking layabout but under his father’s thumb. Bruno conceives a sinister idea: He’ll off Guy’s unfaithful wife so Guy can marry his new sweetheart, and Guy will in turn murder Bruno’s father. Each fellow does the other fellow’s murder. Then there is nothing to connect them. The one who had the motive isn’t there. Each fellow murders a total stranger. Crisscross.

But that is just the clever hook for a story filled with guilt and anguish and apprehension that will stay with you. Alfred Hitchcock made “Strangers on a Train” the basis for a film in 1951. The film is vintage Hitchcock even if it does soft pedal some of the weightier themes of the book. That film then inspired the crime comedy “Throw Momma from the Train” in 1987. Quite a lineage for your first book!

Robert Towers, writing for the New York Review of Books, said, “Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths.” Bruno Antony is among the most disturbed in Highsmith’s rogues gallery.

I’ve heard it said that Highsmith’s book is Dostoevsky without hard work on the part of the reader. Maybe so, but it’s not sympathy or empathy we feel for Highsmith’s sinners but identification. How’s that for a dark proposition?

You can borrow “Strangers on a Train” (book and movie) with your PINES library card.