Strangers on a Train

⚖The case for it

Two men meet in a train bar car and one of them floats a proposal, and Highsmith spends the rest of the book inside both their heads rather than on the mechanics. Bruno is the draw, a “charming sociopath” who is cultured, drunk and impossible to shake off. Guy under sustained pressure is uncomfortable to watch and, readers say, entirely convincing. The prose is “taut and claustrophobic,” the dread built out of pacing rather than incident. What the book actually argues is that these are “ordinary people, all of whom are capable of very ordinary crimes.” One critic: “no one has ever written better about the criminally deranged mind.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The middle sags through a hundred pages of description while nothing advances, “just running out the clock” until the last third. Guy makes decisions readers call implausible rather than tragic, and tells his fiancée nothing across months of it. Bruno is supposed to be the menace and lands as “an alcoholic mama’s boy.” Anne and Miriam are barely drawn. The economy complaint recurs: a “gripping short story squeezed into 280 pages” that “could have been a novella.” One reader dismisses the whole thing as a “nasty story about nasty characters.”

— the honest librarian

5h

honest hours

7

sittings