Strangers on a Train

First published in 1950, Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel begins with a chance encounter aboard a train. Guy Haines, an architect travelling to obtain a divorce, meets Charles Bruno, a charming but deeply disturbed stranger who proposes an extraordinary exchange: each man will murder the other’s chosen victim, leaving neither with an apparent motive. Guy dismisses the suggestion as the fantasy of an unstable mind, but Bruno refuses to let the encounter end with the journey. What follows is a tightening psychological drama in which an ordinary life is gradually drawn into the orbit of another man’s obsession.

Moving between the minds of its two protagonists, Highsmith’s novel explores guilt, complicity, identity and the fragile boundaries between respectability and violence. Its suspense comes not simply from the threat of discovery, but from the disturbing intimacy that develops between two men who might otherwise have remained strangers. The book established Highsmith’s distinctive vision of crime fiction, in which moral certainty gives way to psychological unease, and inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated 1951 film adaptation.

From the book

“The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself.”

— Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

On Strangers on a Train

“Has lost none of its power to disturb.”

— Paula Hawkins, introduction to the 2021 Norton reprint