The premise is diabolical in its elegance: two strangers meet, exchange idle talk, and one proposes a pact so grotesque it seems almost a joke. “You do my murder, I’ll do yours.” A child’s logic, but a murderer’s ingenuity. This was Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel in 1950, and like the serpent in Genesis, she slithered straight into the heart of human frailty and hissed a question we’re still frightened to answer: what would you do, if asked to sin on someone else’s behalf?
When I first read it, I realised how wrong people are to imagine Hitchcock was the master and Highsmith merely the source. In truth, Highsmith’s book’s a deeper wound than the film ever allowed. Hitchcock gave us suspense, shadow, and spectacle; Highsmith gave us guilt, sickness, and the slow rotting of the human conscience. His camera made us bite our nails. Her words make us doubt our own decency.
The novel feels almost Dostoevskian. Raskolnikov, after all, kills his pawnbroker and then spends the rest of Crime and Punishment in dialogue with his own corrupted soul. Highsmith’s characters are equally trapped in a purgatory of their own creation. Bruno, the tempter – flamboyant, charming, intoxicated with his own perversity – reminds me of Iago whispering poison into Othello’s ear. And poor Guy, the architect (literally a man who builds structures) becomes instead the man whose moral structure is dismantled piece by piece until he’s left standing in ruins.
Here, then, is the true horror: not that strangers might meet on a train and concoct a murder pact, but that we – all of us – are strangers to ourselves. Given the right nudge, the right temptation, the right justification, we too might find ourselves entangled in a deed we swore we’d never commit. As Paul wrote to the Romans, ‘For what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.’ Highsmith understood this Pauline paradox better than most theologians: sin’s not an aberration, but the shadow stitched into our very being.
I’ve always thought trains are the perfect metaphor. They’re vessels of fate. Once you’re on board, the rails are already laid, the destination already fixed. To sit opposite a stranger in a carriage is to confront chance dressed as destiny. Bruno and Guy’s encounter is both accidental and inevitable. Like Sophocles’ Oedipus, they’re dragged along by forces that feel both random and ordained.
Reading Strangers on a Train today, I can’t help but see it as a commentary on modern complicity. Who among us has not been co-opted, however unwillingly, into another’s scheme? Whether it be a workplace culture, a political movement, or even the grim compromises of family life, we’re forever asked to carry sins that aren’t quite our own. And the longer we resist, the more enmeshed we become, until our silence makes us guilty anyway.
Hitchcock gave us a thriller. Highsmith gave us a mirror. And when I peer into that mirror, I don’t see just Bruno and Guy, but myself – one half tempter, one half tempted. The novel’s not merely about murder; it’s about the subterranean geography of the soul, the iron rails of guilt, and the terrifying possibility that the greatest stranger we’ll ever meet is the one already seated in our own heart.
Wording 