Strangers on a Train
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Narrated by:
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Bronson Pinchot
About this listen
In Patricia Highsmith's debut novel, we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith's perilous world - where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.
The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith on a prolific career of noir fiction and proved her mastery of depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.
©2015 Patricia Highsmith (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, Another Country tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way. Another Country is a work that is as powerful today as it was 40 years ago - and expertly narrated by Dion Graham.
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Powerful and sad
- By Kenneth on 04-10-09
By: James Baldwin
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Perchance to Dream
- Selected Stories
- By: Charles Beaumont
- Narrated by: J. Paul Boehmer, Gabrielle de Cuir, Harlan Ellison, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The profoundly original and wildly entertaining short stories of a legendary Twilight Zone writer. It is only natural that Charles Beaumont would make a name for himself crafting scripts for The Twilight Zone - for his was an imagination so limitless it must have emerged from some other dimension. Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont's finest stories, including five that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes.
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Contents
- By Ralph Freaster on 06-22-16
By: Charles Beaumont
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The Keep
- The Adversary Cycle, Book 1
- By: F. Paul Wilson
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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"Something is murdering my men." Thus reads the message received from a Nazi commander stationed in a small castle high in the remote Transylvanian Alps. Invisible and silent, the enemy selects one victim per night, leaving the bloodless and mutilated corpses behind to terrify its future victims. When an elite SS extermination squad is dispatched to solve the problem, the men find something that's both powerful and terrifying. Panicked, the Nazis bring in a local expert on folklore - who just happens to be Jewish - to shed some light on the mysterious happenings.
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At long last, The classic horror novel on Audible
- By Shieldslinger on 07-22-20
By: F. Paul Wilson
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Death in Zanzibar
- By: M. M. Kaye
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Dany Ashton is invited to vacation at her stepfather's house in Zanzibar, but even before her airplane takes off there is a stolen passport, a midnight intruder - and murder. In Zanizbar, the family house is Kivulimi, the mysterious "House of Shade", where Dany and the rest of the guests learn that one of them is a desperate killer. The air of freedom and nonchalance that opened the house party fades into growing terror, as the threat of futher violence flowers in the scented air of Zanzibar.
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Old Favorite Now in Audio
- By Marie on 01-13-13
By: M. M. Kaye
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The Glass Key
- By: Dashiell Hammett
- Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness. A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett invented the noir crime novel.
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Pacing Quick & Plot was Goldilocks
- By Darwin8u on 05-16-12
By: Dashiell Hammett
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London Fields
- By: Martin Amis
- Narrated by: Steven Pacey
- Length: 21 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing who is intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts; or the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch. As Nicola leads her suitors towards the precipice, London--and, indeed, the whole world--seems to shamble after them in a corrosively funny novel of complexity and morality.
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Big chewy novel, excellent narration
- By Sand on 08-21-14
By: Martin Amis
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The Great Gatsby
- By: F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Narrated by: Tim Robbins
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Set against a backdrop of jazz music, bootlegging, and lavish parties, The Great Gatsby is the story of Midwesterner Nick Carraway’s curious introduction to the decadent world of his mysterious, wealthy neighbor Jay Gatsby, whose thirst for riches is matched only by his tragic obsession with the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. This dangerously propulsive tale of glitz and glamour continues to be relevant as listeners long for escapist novels—a chance to flee into Gatsby’s famed mansion and lose oneself in the rush of opulence.
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Alive and Wild! I finished it same day.
- By Brea DeMarquee on 08-27-21
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Welcome to the Monkey House
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: David Strathairn, Maria Tucci, Bill Irwin, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.
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Classic Vonnegut
- By Michael Carrato on 08-17-06
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine pal, but he grows enraged by Dickie's ambivalent feelings for Marge, a charming American dilettante.
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A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between her child and her lover.
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I can't stop thinking about this book...
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In This Sweet Sickness, David Kelsey has an unyielding conviction that life will turn out all right for him; he just has to fix "the situation" of being in love with a married woman. Obsessed with Annabelle and the life he has imagined for them, David prepares to win her over, whatever it takes. In this riveting tale of a deluded loner, Highsmith reveals her uncanny ability to draw out the secret obsessions that overwhelm the human heart.
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Highly recommended!
- By nancy on 10-11-18
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A Suspension of Mercy
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The remarkable renaissance of Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories, featuring the groundbreaking novels Strangers on a Train and The Price of Salt as well as a trove of penetrating short stories. With a critical introduction by Joan Schenkar, situating Highsmith’s classic works within her own tumultuous life, this book provides a useful guide to some of her most dazzlingly seductive writing.
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Disappointing
- By Patricia on 12-09-16
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The Talented Mr. Ripley
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I can't stop thinking about this book...
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In This Sweet Sickness, David Kelsey has an unyielding conviction that life will turn out all right for him; he just has to fix "the situation" of being in love with a married woman. Obsessed with Annabelle and the life he has imagined for them, David prepares to win her over, whatever it takes. In this riveting tale of a deluded loner, Highsmith reveals her uncanny ability to draw out the secret obsessions that overwhelm the human heart.
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Highly recommended!
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Ray Garrett, a wealthy young American living in Europe, is grieving over the death of his wife. Ray is at a loss for why she would take her own life, but Peggy's father, Ed Coleman, has no such uncertainty - he blames Ray completely. Late one night in Rome, Coleman shoots Ray at point-blank range. He thinks he's had his revenge, but Ray survives and follows Coleman and his wealthy girlfriend to Venice.
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Like listening to the B side…
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In Deep Water, set in the small town of Little Wesley, Vic and Melinda Meller's loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Eventually, Vic tries to win her back by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder - one that soon comes true.
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Set in Tunisia in the mid-1960s, this is the story of Howard Ingham, an American writer who has gone abroad to gather material for a movie too sordid to be set in America. Ingham is cool toward the girlfriend he left behind in New York - but his feelings start to change when she doesn't answer his increasingly aggravated letters and the filmmaker who hired Ingham fails to show in Tunisia.
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Engrossing
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A devious serial killer lays siege to the city of Philadelphia, brutally sacrificing pretty young Catholic girls on the altar of insanity. As the body count rises, an exceptional investigating partnership struggles to stop him. Detective Jessica Balzano, Philly's Homicide Unit's newest rookie, is teamed up with veteran cop Kevin Byrne, respected for his solve rate and known for his unorthodox methods.
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Excellent Read
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A Dog’s Ransom
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The great revival of interest in Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of a novel that will give dog owners nightmares for years to come. With an eerie simplicity of style, Highsmith turns our next-door neighbors into sadistic psychopaths, lying in wait among white picket fences and manicured lawns. In A Dog's Ransom, Highsmith blends savage humor with brilliant social satire in this dark tale of a high-minded criminal who hits a wealthy Manhattan couple where it hurts the most.
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Book's Bark is Worse than its Bite.
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Eleven
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- Unabridged
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The legendary writer Patricia Highsmith is best remembered today for her chilling psychological thrillers The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train. A critically acclaimed, best-selling author in Europe, Highsmith has for too long been underappreciated in the United States. Eleven is Highsmith's first collection of short stories, an arresting group of dark masterpieces of obsession and foreboding, violence and instability.
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Excellent Selection!
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Double Indemnity
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Tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful, Double Indemnity gives us an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. First published in 1936, this novel reaffirmed James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir.
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Morals be gone
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By: James M. Cain
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Falsely convicted of fraud, the easygoing but naive Philip Carter is sentenced to six lonely, drug-ravaged years in prison. Upon his release, Carter is a more suspicious and violent man. For those around him, earning back his trust can mean the difference between life and death.
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Letter from a fan in Prison
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The Last Equation of Isaac Severy
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Just days after mathematician and family patriarch Isaac Severy dies of an apparent suicide, his adopted granddaughter Hazel, owner of a struggling Seattle bookstore, receives a letter from him by mail. In it, Isaac alludes to a secretive organization that is after his final bombshell equation, and he charges Hazel with safely delivering it to a trusted colleague. But first, she must find where the equation is hidden.
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Spoiler Alert
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The Glass Key
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Performance
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Story
Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness. A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett invented the noir crime novel.
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Pacing Quick & Plot was Goldilocks
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Pacific Glory
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Marsh Vincent, Mick McCarty, and Tommy Lewis were inseparable friends during their naval academy years, each man in love with the beautiful, unattainable Glory Hawthorne. Only Tommy wins her heart and marries Glory after graduation. Different skills set the three men on separate paths in the Navy, but they are all forever changed by the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941.
Glory, now Tommy’s widow, is a tough Navy nurse still grieving her loss while trying to save lives at the Pearl Harbor naval hospital.
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Best of PT Deutermann
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A Far Cry from Kensington
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Mrs. Hawkins, the majestic narrator of A Far Cry from Kensington, takes us well in hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London. There, as a fat and much admired young war widow, she spent her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher (“of very good books”) and her nights dispensing advice at her small South Kensington rooming house. At work and at home Mrs. Hawkins soon uncovered evil: shady literary doings and a deadly enemy; anonymous letters, blackmail, and suicide.
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Truth Teller In The Midst Of Posers & The Clueless
- By Sara on 10-03-15
By: Muriel Spark
What listeners say about Strangers on a Train
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Chris Henson
- 05-19-21
Forget what you know from Hitch’s movie, this is something wholly other.
I’m a Hitchcock fan from way back. And “Strangers” is one of my favorite films. Its sunny charm and crackling humor and steaming, churning pace make it fun and thrilling from engine to caboose.
After reading a Hitch bio, I decided to visit some of his source material and started here. The vast difference in narrative and tone are striking. Absent are the charm and humor. In their place is a brooding, dark, psychological study that at once mirrors society at large and struggles to make sense of a post-war world. Guy and Bruno’s roles are familiar, sure. But their motivations run much, much deeper.
Patricia Highsmith has a brilliant voice that situates the reader squarely in the killing mind. I wasn’t prepared for how emotional this book is, or how introspective and even frustrating. I’m a full-fledged Highsmith fan now!
I must add how very much I enjoyed Bronson Pinchot’s performance. He brought the book alive carefully, stealthily, like a lone whistle in the distance signaling the raging locomotive on its way.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Penny
- 02-10-16
Very heavy but amazing
This is not for the superficial reader. But if one enjoys analysis of human emotion, behavior.. Society and individual right vs wrong, and all the grey areas in between. This is a novel that takes one deep into that grey area. Not with boring rhetoric, but full of rich discovery of individuals conscious. Differentiating between the informed conscious and the fully "formed" and heavy developed.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Lisa
- 03-07-21
Psychological thriller at its best!
Narration was excellent, characters brilliantly described. Story intense and well laid out. So much better than the movie by Hitchcock. Elaborate depth of characters and their personalities. Highly recommend.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kattia
- 11-11-17
Highly Entertaining
Highsmith makes an accurate exploration of human nature... How about removing the only obstacle to get what you want? the price is your peace of mind! I enjoyed this book very much.
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- Cabby Flynn
- 09-12-20
Patricia Highsmith’s 1st Novel - Intense Psychological Drama
The first novel by Patricia Highsmith (“The Talented Mr. Ripley” series) is an intense psychological drama, wonderfully written, if occasionally a little hard to listen to, with a couple of plot twists, including the ending. Bronson Pinchot’s rendition is excellent.
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- Pam
- 02-20-23
Keyword: cathect
Good and evil, two sides of the same coin? This is a story that depicts the human struggle to integrate direct ones good and evil sides. Torn between his feelings ( rage, wish to kill his ex wife, and his IDEA (Plato) /ideals/Christian middle class "training" Guy , a self aware, intelligent, talented, gifted , but ambivalent "architect"/ builder of beautiful structures so graceful and attuned they confer grace, meets his opposite, while in transit - through the wasteland on his way to Texas. to divorce himself from the past so he can start a "new life' with Anne who is apparently 'pure' focused,productive and in control of her life. Guy arrogantly assumes he can interact with Charles Bruno without becoming magnetized or absorbed into him, but he is no match for the Devil. His sensibily is constructed and in process. His over-riding insistence in doing what is right requires him to self-condemn. When they meet on the train his mind is in turmoil and chaotic. He is therefore open and vulnerable to the fatal magnetism of Bruno. Guy is no match for the Devil. He is neither strong enough to integrate and evolve the dissolution and darkness nor stable enough in his constructed self, his architected self to differentiate himself entirely from the darkness, Bruno. The train rolls ceaselessly through a hellish wasteland, a featureless,beige undefined zone, where anything can happen, where one is suspended between here and there, past and future, a zone where one can start with one destination and find that trajectory fatally compelled in a completely other direction. Bronson Pinchot was brilliant as narrator and the perfect choice for this story
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- Elizabeth K. Claussen
- 06-03-23
Great psychological insight
I was impressed by the story and well paced way in which Highsmith shows Guy’s slowly developing awareness of and insight in to himself. Very much enjoyed the complexity and forthrightness of the characters.
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- JGS
- 06-29-23
Excellent!
Found the plot clever and the idea of dual sides of a human being realistic. Reminded me of the Don Draper character in Mad Men.
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- M. Crassus
- 04-03-24
Everything
Best combination of story and narration I have found- and I listen to A LOT of audiobooks
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- Joe Kraus
- 04-02-17
A Hardboiled Novel of Manners
Any additional comments?
If the term doesn’t already exist, I want to coin this a ‘hardboiled novel of manners’. There’s a genteel novel-of-manners feel to it as we get a lot of attention on the niceties of how properly to entertain someone, how architecture or fashion functions as social statement, and how people generally express themselves through subtle public gestures.
Highsmith’s central insight seems to be that civilization (or what she has her characters call “society” when it comes to the fore in the final pages) is a thin veneer on top of a species with the capacity to be real animals. Bruno says as much in the opening scene when he declares that every man is capable of murder, and that’s borne out. Everyone (except the saintly Anne) is indeed capable of murder. We need laws to keep us from going wild, but it isn’t clear society truly wants that. Most of the characters seem happy to tolerate murder as long as it doesn’t affect them. It just seems understood that people do bad things.
Highsmith uses that hardboiled axiom to explore the famous premise of the novel: two men meet on a train and toy with the idea of having each commit a murder on the other’s behalf. Without motives, each murderer would go unsuspected, yet each would accomplish his goal.
In Hitchcock’s hands, that story became a chance for him to explore his own favored notion of a protagonist who, somehow a little guilty or compromised (whether for listening to a murderous stranger on a train or simply peeping into a neighbor’s window) finds himself a fundamentally innocent man bound up with truly despicable people. Highsmith’s vision is much darker. [SPOILER] Most tellingly, Guy actually goes on to commit the murder that Bruno wants from him. Hitchcock gives his protagonist an out; he eventually pulls himself back from the “deal” he’s entered into. Highsmith’s protagonist gets broken down, however. Under the pressure of Bruno’s obsession, he proceeds to kill Bruno’s father. Later, he begins to echo many of the more Bruno’s more despicable quirks. At the end he determines that anyone can be broken down, that we’re all so fundamentally vicious that the right pressure can turn us all into characters.
There’s a crispness throughout most of this, but I think it falls a bit short in some of its psychological profiling. In the end, I simply don’t find Guy’s breakdown authentic. Compromised as he might be, I don’t accept why he doesn’t go to the police, especially when he has such compelling evidence of Bruno’s guilt. Highsmith writes compellingly, but I think this falls a bit short of the even darker, more efficient Talented Mr. Ripley.
As a final thought, I wondered whether this might in some way be a comment on the then only 6-7 years old Fountainhead. We have here a protagonist who realizes, eventually, that individuals stand apart from a rule-bound society. He feels called to do great things, and he concludes that simple things, like other people’s lives, shouldn’t hold him back.
I have not read The Fountainhead, but is there’s anything to my hunch, this is not a flattering comment. The novel ultimately does not endorse such a vision of the power of the great ego. Rather, we come to find Guy a somewhat small man, a man whose being broken down by another has undermined the real gifts he had. In fact, as I read it, this undermines Ayn Rand altogether. Skeptical as this is of what holds society together, it laments our alone-ness rather than celebrates it.
Highsmith remains the first acknowledged female star of the hardboiled tradition. If all you know of this one is the film, you’re in for a surprise.
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