Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on the train by any means. He was cruel and corrupt enough himself to appreciate a story like that of his first love. And Steve was only the surprise ending that made the rest fall into place.
I immediately followed the reading of Strangers on a Train with the viewing of the 1951 Hitchcock film adaptation, and I can confidently say: if you’ve only seen the movie, you don’t know this book at all. Everyone probably knows the murder swap concept at the heart of this story (criss cross!), but where a novel improves on a film is the room for introspection and the revelation of private thoughts, and in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, this is a thrilling exploration of privilege and psychopathy; of what forces might drive even a decent man to murder. Great stuff! (I am proceeding as though everyone knows the basic plot.)
Bruno slammed his palms together. “Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! We murder for each other, see? I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on the train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?”
Cheeses! Bruno is such an unlikeable character — idle rich and wants his father dead just because he’s withholding Bruno’s inheritance until he makes something of himself — that even a stranger on a train has got him pegged, Despair, Guy thought, the desperate boredom of the wealthy that tended to destroy rather than create. And it could lead to crime as easily as privation. What Guy can’t see is the nasty Oedipal bits, where Bruno is in love with his mother, impotent with the ladies, and more than a little in love with Guy himself. Meanwhile, Guy is estranged from the young wife who cheated on him three years earlier, and now that she’s pregnant with yet another man’s baby, Guy is stunned to learn that she plans to refuse his divorce and follow him to his big architecture job in Palm Springs for the support and respectability. Guy sure is mad at Miriam — especially since he wants to marry the upper class, long-suffering Anne — but he doesn’t want her dead, does he? Guy is plagued by philosophical upset.
But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative.
Although Guy never agreed to the twisted plan, Bruno decides to carry through with his end of the murder — just as a gift to that good fellow he met on the train. But even though never contacting one another was integral to eliminate motive, Bruno can’t help but call, write, telegraph, and show up on the doorstep of the horrified Guy; eventually insinuating himself into the social life of Guy and his new bride Anne, always asking when Guy was going to hold up his end of the deal; eventually threatening to reveal everything.
In the nights when he could not sleep, he enacted the murder, and it soothed him like a drug. It was not murder but an act he performed to rid himself of Bruno, the slice of a knife that cut away a malignant growth. In the night Bruno’s father was not a person but an object, as he himself was not a person but a force. To enact it. Leaving the Luger in the room, to follow Bruno’s progress to conviction and death, was a catharsis.
Another upgrade in the novel is a bland and frumpy private detective, Arthur Gerard of the Confidential Detective Agency, who never quite looks like he’s paying attention to the action, but who never misses a beat. Anyone planning the perfect crime would do well to avoid Gerard. Cheeses! Criss cross!
Enjoyed by audiobook while recovering, face down, from retina reattachment eye surgery; it felt good to switch things up by throwing a movie into the mix.
