Just Finished Reading Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

Strangers on a Train, from 1950, is perhaps novelist and short story writer Patricia Highsmith's most famous work, adapted into a movie screen thriller by Alfred Hitchcock the following year.  Having quoted the author last Friday on this blog, I thought it would be fun reading this story since I never did see the film version.  As it turned out, I enjoyed it and regard it as a psychological crime thriller reminiscent of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in more ways than one and a forerunner to the Columbo TV series starring Peter Falk as the unassuming, wily homicide detective.  The premise is simple enough: while on a train to a meeting with his unfaithful, estranged wife Miriam to plead with her to give him a divorce, architect Guy Haines encounters a psychopathic, vindictive-but-charming young man, Charles Bruno, who is heir to a fortune but despises his hard-driving, stern father.  After Guy spills out his heart about Miriam, Bruno suggests to him that they exchange murders...he would kill Miriam and Guy would do the same with Bruno's father: that would give each an apparently foolproof alibi and the results they wanted.  Although Guy does not agree with this hellish proposal, Bruno later imagines that the two had made a compact and the story turns in a nightmarish direction involving murder.  Highsmith makes a lot out of the thinking of both Charles Bruno and Guy Haines, two men with diametrically opposite personalities, as they try to evade the suspicion of Arthur Gerard, a clever private investigator in the line of Dostoevsky's unforgettable Porfiry Petrovich...and the later Lt. Columbo.  I thought Gerard's character was the highlight of the novel...ironically it seems that Hitchcock's movie adaptation wrote him out of the story as well as drastically changing the plot.  I'd like to see the movie just to note the differences, but I recommend you read the book first as I did.  It's not a whodunnit mystery but rather a story of how guilty parties squirm and plot to evade the consequences of their actions, and how no matter how perfect a strategy may seem on the drawing board, just a little of the chaos of real-time events can completely unravel it...