Strangers on a Train

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Overview

With the acclaim for The Talented Mr. Ripley, more film projects in production, and two biographies forthcoming, expatriate legend Patricia Highsmith would be shocked to see that she has finally arrived in her homeland. Throughout her career, Highsmith brought a keen literary eye and a genius for plumbing the psychopathic mind to more than thirty works of fiction, unparalleled in their placid deviousness and sardonic humor. With deadpan accuracy, she delighted in creating true sociopaths in the guise of the everyday man or woman. Now, one of her finest works is again in print: Strangers on a Train, Highsmith's first novel and the source for Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1953 film. With this ...

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Overview

With the acclaim for The Talented Mr. Ripley, more film projects in production, and two biographies forthcoming, expatriate legend Patricia Highsmith would be shocked to see that she has finally arrived in her homeland. Throughout her career, Highsmith brought a keen literary eye and a genius for plumbing the psychopathic mind to more than thirty works of fiction, unparalleled in their placid deviousness and sardonic humor. With deadpan accuracy, she delighted in creating true sociopaths in the guise of the everyday man or woman. Now, one of her finest works is again in print: Strangers on a Train, Highsmith's first novel and the source for Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1953 film. With this novel, Highsmith revels in eliciting the unsettling psychological forces that lurk beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.

Editorial Reviews

New Yorker
Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing ....bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.
Time
For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith.
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
Library Journal
From the I can't believe this is out of print department comes Highsmith's white-knuckler and the basis of the Hitchcock film of the same name. With this, her first novel, Highsmith set the pattern she would follow in later books, introducing sociopaths who are so subtle they can pass unnoticed in the world around them. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780393321982
  • Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
  • Publication date: 8/28/2001
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 281
  • Sales rank: 143,070
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 0.70 (d)

Meet the Author

Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was the author of more than twenty novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories.

Biography

Suspense novels are often described as "chilling," but no one turns down the reader's emotional thermostat quite like Patricia Highsmith, author of such haunting psychological thrillers as Strangers on a Train and creator of the sociopathic series protagonist Tom Ripley. During her life, Highsmith was a popular author in Europe, where she lived; in her native United States, however, her books went sporadically in and out of print for decades. Now, the writer whom Graham Greene called "the poet of apprehension" has finally gained recognition in the States -- not only as a master of the suspense genre, but as a literary author of rare talent.

Highsmith grew up in Texas and New York, but spent most of her adult life in England, France and Switzerland. By most accounts she was a loner who avoided other people, including other writers; but she did have early help in her career from Truman Capote, who got her a stint at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, tells the story of an architect and a psychopath who meet on a train and "swap" murders. The book gained Highsmith considerable fame, especially after it was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. A second novel, The Price of Salt, was printed under a pseudonym after her first publishers turned it down. Though her subsequent works didn't sell well in her home country, she kept turning out the kinds of novels and short stories the New Yorker called "bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night."

Several movies have been loosely based on Highsmith's books, including Danny DeVito's Hitchcock spoof Throw Momma From the Train; Wim Wenders' The American Friend, adapted from Ripley's Game; and Purple Noon, a French film based on The Talented Mr. Ripley. But it was Academy Award-winning director Anthony Minghella's lush screen adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, released four years after Highsmith's death and 44 years after the book's publication, that introduced Highsmith to a wider audience and led to a rediscovery of her works.

Subtle enough for a seminar yet entertaining enough for the beach, Highsmith's coolly narrated tales of terror display an observant eye for social behavior as well as individual psychology. Most books in the suspense genre provide a hero whose fundamental honesty and decency stand as bulwarks against the evil he or she confronts. But in a Highsmith novel, the reader is alone with victim and victimizer -- and an unsettling sense of empathy with both.

As Francis Wyndham has noted, Highsmith's "peculiar brand of horror comes less from the inevitability of disaster, than from the ease with which it might have been avoided. The evil of her agents is answered by the impotence of her patients -- this is not the attraction of opposites, but in some subtle way the call of like to like. When they finally clash in the climactic catastrophe, the reader's sense of satisfaction may derive from sources as dark as those which motivate Patricia Highsmith's destroyers and their fascinated victims."

Good To Know

Patricia Highsmith was born Mary Patricia Plangman; her parents divorced soon after she was born, however, and she was given her stepfather's last name. After Highsmith graduated from college, she lived for a time with her mother and stepfather in Greenwich Village, where she wrote comic books to support herself, including scripts for the Superman series.

A lesbian herself, Highsmith is thought to have written the first American novel in which a homosexual love story has a happy ending. The novel, The Price of Salt, was published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan; it was reissued in 1984 (as Carol), but didn't appear under the writer's real name until 1991.

Highsmith once told an interviewer that the only suspense writer she read was the master -- Dostoevsky, over and over. In her book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, she wrote, "I think most of Dostoyevsky's books would be called suspense books, were they being published today for the first time. But he would be asked to cut, because of production costs."

The premise of The Talented Mr. Ripley was inspired by Henry James's The Ambassadors, in which a widow sends her fiance from America to Paris to fetch her wayward son.

    1. Also Known As:
      Mary Patricia Plangman (birth name); Claire Morgan (pen name)
    1. Date of Birth:
      January 19, 1921
    2. Place of Birth:
      Fort Worth, Texas
    1. Date of Death:
      February 4, 1995
    2. Place of Death:
      Locarno, Switzerland

Customer Reviews

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( 6 )

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Sort by: Showing all of 6 Customer Reviews

  • Posted September 19, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    Unconvincing

    This book is not nearly as frightening as it is unbelievable. We learn what the main subject of the book is very quickly; a perfect murder. It's supposed to be the perfect crime; you kill my father and I will kill your wife. We are strangers, so we have no link to each other's victims except this meeting. This is what Charles Bruno suggests to Guy Haines on the train where they meet for the first time, and improbably, they quickly get into a conversation about murdering each other's burdens. The way Bruno injects himself into Guy's life after this is sly, but is also unconvincing. We are told that the murder of Miriam (Guy's wife from which he is seeking a divorce) is Bruno's first murder. However, Bruno does it with such ease and eagerness that he seems more like a seasoned killer than an amateur. While some read this book to be a deep look at the criminal mind, to me it is more a light skim of human guilt and it's reactions. The reader is given more description about the superficial things like food and appearances than deep emotional and personal experiences. Later on in the book, when we find out how successful Guy is in his career, it's surprising because Guy's life is never described with much depth. There is also a lot we never learn about Bruno or his past, but this doesn't seem necessarily intentional. While I do see the allusions of incest, specifically in Bruno's descriptions of his own mother, I never see the homosexual references that everyone seems to describe when talking about Highsmith's writing. Bruno's descriptions of Guy seem to be more about envy than attraction. Bruno is fascinated and jealous of Guy's world, and Bruno lives in that world through his platonic but obsessive relationship with Guy. Also, Bruno's death is simpler than it should be and seems like an easy way to get rid of a character to allow the book to end the way Highsmith intended. This book is the original, male, and most importantly, less frightening, version of Single White Female. Not the story I expected it to be and certainly not as much depth as a lot of people seem to give it credit for.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 7, 2003

    Timeless Suspense

    If you are interested in a quick yet intense read, this is the book. It is fabulously narrated and is definately a psychological thriller. It is a timeless story of murder that has not deminished in believability over the years.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted September 2, 2009

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    I Also Recommend:

    9780393332148

    cool

    very cool and bloody fantastic

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 6, 2010

    No text was provided for this review.

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    Posted October 22, 2008

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    Posted July 16, 2009

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