Strangers on a Train

In Patricia Highsmith's debut novel, Strangers on a Train, we are introduced to Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, two passengers on the same train. Guy is a successful architect going through a bitter divorce. Bruno, on the other hand, turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. “Some people are better off dead,” Bruno remarks, “like your wife and my father, for instance. ” As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith's dangerous world, where under the right circumstances anyone is capable of murder. The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1951 film of the same name launched Highsmith and her signature tone of suspense on a career that would last more than forty years.