PATRICIA HIGHSMITH – Strangers on a Train: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, January 19, 2021. Introduction by Paula Hawkins. First edition: Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1950.

   Guy Haines isn’t sure what will happen when he gets off the train to meet his estranged wife Miriam. Her track record of infidelities should make divorce simple, but if she’s pregnant, she may make things awkward for Guy and his soon-to-be fiancée.

   When he commiserates with Charles Bruno in the train dining car about his situation, he doesn’t pay much Bruno’s talk about having an insufferable father and how two people could “trade murders.” After police find Miriam’s strangled body in an amusement park, Bruno reappears, demanding that Guy “hold up his end of the deal.”

   Strangers on a Train is Highsmith’s first published novel, so there are moments where her style feels unvarnished compared to later works (Deep Water, the Tom Ripley novels). But she already knows how to create a vivid scene, especially the inner torments as her hero agonizes over how to escape Bruno’s game.

   While later books were more obviously literary (The Talented Mr. Ripley riffs on Henry James’ 1903 novel The Ambassadors), she already shows a clever ability to invert crime fiction into something stranger. Paula Hawkins’ introduction to this 2020 edition highlights how scarily Highsmith encourages readers to question what makes murder wrong, or if it is so bad after all.

   Hawkins also highlights how Highsmith uses a “pared-back, laconic style” to describe horrible crimes as well as everyday things (the sort of casual tone about murder contemporary readers associate with writers like Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk). Put these elements together, not to mention the fine line between hate and love Hawkins notices is very thin indeed in some Highsmith stories, and this book becomes far creepier than it appears.

   If Highsmith is important to noir, and it’s probably impossible to talk about the genre without mentioning her, it’s because she excels at handling this ambiguity. Where other novelists draw clear lines between stalker and victim, tempter and innocent, she quietly suggested that these characters may be more similar, more drawn to each other, than they want to admit.

   It may not feel transgressive as Ellis, Palahniuk, or later female virtuosos like Gillian Flynn, but Highsmith was a master at producing a thriller that slowly invites readers into something more genre-bending and perverse than they expect.