Strangers on a Train
Books | Fiction / Noir
3.7
(273)
Patricia Highsmith
"For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith." —Time The world of Patricia Highsmith has always been filled with ordinary people, all of whom are capable of very ordinary crimes. This theme was present from the beginning, when her debut, Strangers on a Train, galvanized the reading public. Here we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno 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 perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder. The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith on a prolific career of noir fiction, proving her a master at depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.
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More Details:
Author
Patricia Highsmith
Pages
256
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
Published Date
2001-08-17
ISBN
039334469X 9780393344691
Community ReviewsSee all
"Just finished reading this amazing book. I enjoyed diving in to the life of two completely different people, and how they had to deal with the pressure in their life. Definitely would recommend reading. "
D T
Diana Trifanenkova
"There were some interesting ideas here, with the way that the two men kind of orbited around each other, and the inevitability of their downfall. The premise and idea of the murders interested me as well, but both characters were so annoying and made such stupid post-murder decisions that it was hard to sustain interest for the length of the book. This might have fared better as a short story."
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