Patricia Highsmith – ‘Strangers on a Train’

Bruno waited boredly smiling, looking up at the ferris wheel’s arc of lights and the tiny people swinging in benches up there in the black sky. Far off through the trees, he saw lights twinkling on water. It was quite a park. He wanted to ride the ferris wheel. He felt wonderful. He was taking it easy, not getting excited. The merry-go-round played ‘Casey would waltz with the strawberry blonde…’ Grinning, he turned to Miriam’s red hair, and their eyes met, but hers moved on and he was sure she hadn’t noticed him, but he mustn’t do that again. A rush of anxiety made him snicker. Miriam didn’t look at all smart, he decided, which amused him, too. He could see why Guy would loathe her. He loathed her, too, with all his guts! Maybe she was lying to Guy about having a baby. And Guy was so honest himself, he believed her. Bitch! (p. 75)

Reminiscent for an instant of Harry Lime’s speech in The Third Man, looking down from the Prater Wheel, Charles Bruno is a much less shrewd psychopath. In this scene he stalks Miriam Haines, whom he has taken it into his head to kill, following an encounter with her estranged husband Guy on a train from New York. Guy, an architect, wants a divorce, but has in prospect a big contract to design a country club in Palm Beach, which is likely to make him rich and famous, and Miriam likely to set more financially demanding terms if she finds out about it. As Bruno’s thoughts suggest, she is not in his league intellectually or socially, but the snobbery is not all one way: Guy reflects that he is nothing like her type, which is ‘tall and dark, with a long face’ (p. 38), and believes she would never have had a child with him. The estrangement is well established, they both have new partners, and thoughts of re-marrying. There really is no need for her to die: it would just make Guy’s upward mobility smoother, that’s all. Bruno, meanwhile, is at odds with his father for keeping back an allowance he believes he is entitled to, for reasons which seem pretty obvious: ‘Harvard. Busted out sophomore year. Drinking and gambling. […] Okay, I’m a bum, so what?’ (p. 17). He’s hardly cut off without a dime, though: he goes to his mother for money instead, which she gives him willingly enough. The double murder Bruno proposes is out of proportion to the motives he and Guy have, but he finds the idea of it so elegant: ‘A pure murder, without personal motives!’ (p. 60). If Bruno were to kill Miriam, it would be untraceable because he has no motive, and the same applies to Guy and Samuel Bruno. Just as long as no-one thinks to connect Guy and Bruno to each other.

The impossibility of Guy and Bruno keeping apart is what gives the novel much of its tension. Whenever the narrative comes from Bruno’s point of view, it is slippery in the extreme: there are gaps in his own memory, because he is drunk a lot of the time, but also, he is constantly tempted to sabotage his own careful plotting, either by maintaining contact with Guy or by blurting out clues, with more glee than guilt. It’s reminiscent of Eucrid Eucrow or Bunny Munro from Nick Cave’s novels; or Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Wise Blood or Crime and Punishment. Minds set on rails no-one can see. When it comes to his father’s murder, Bruno sends plans of his house to Guy, down to the level of which stairs creak (he invents a rhyme to help Guy remember), and he does it repeatedly, obsessively, varying and honing, almost merging with Guy in drawing up plans as detailed as an architect’s. For his part, when he arrives to commit the murder of Samuel Bruno, Guy pauses to critique the house:

As he had suspected from Bruno’s drawings, the house was too small for its ten double gables, obviously built because the client wanted gables and that was that. (p. 149)

A theme of doubling is developed, as Guy gets closer to the loopiness of Bruno. Anyone can murder: the setup of Bruno as dissolute and Guy as respectable is deliberately false. Bruno tries to explain to Anne, Guy’s second wife:

People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person. There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush. (p. 250)

There are hints that Bruno is sexually attracted to Guy, conveyed mostly by the abjection which alternates with blackmail threats, and by his lack of enthusiasm for sex with women (‘Once, one terrible time, he had started giggling.’ (p. 207)). There is a fraught scene in a restaurant late on which has tender moments, and an indication later still that Guy without Bruno is bereft, so there is some reciprocation of affection. Almost as an antidote to this, Guy returns to thinking about Miriam at the end of the book, about who her death has hurt. He can’t find anyone.