"Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! We murder for each other, see? I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on the train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?"
— Charles Anthony Bruno
Novelist Patricia Highsmith's 1950 debut. While traveling by train, up-and-coming architect Guy Haines is distracted from thoughts of his unhappy marriage (and upcoming ugly divorce) by the awkward friendship-overtures of Idle Rich drunkard Charles Anthony Bruno. Bruno, it turns out, is a Thrill Seeker who thinks he'd like to murder someone some day. While laying out his aspirations to Guy, Bruno comes up with an idea for a Murder Swap.
In 1951 Alfred Hitchcock adapted the story into a film with the same title, characters, and initial situation, but a noticeably divergent plot.
This novel provides examples of:
- Accidental Suicide: Charles Bruno dies by getting drunk and falling out of a sailboat. (This could plausibly be a deliberate suicide, but the possibility isn't followed up on in-story; everyone treats it as an accident.)
- Age Insecurity: Bruno has this on his mother's behalf. He's proud of her for looking like a much younger woman, and it upsets him when, after her husband's death, she starts showing her age.
- The Alcoholic: Bruno is at least a little tight in virtually every scene he appears in. His drinking gets worse over the course of the book, with marked effects on his health.
- Ambiguously Gay: Bruno has several hints of this.
- He's never been in love with a woman, and (except for right after he kills Miriam) is unenthusiastic about sleeping with them. He "doesn't care too much" about it and has never been able to consider it anything other than "silly business". Whenever he has slept with women he's felt as though he's watching himself the entire time, and once even laughed while it was happening.
- Once, as he daydreams about being interviewed, he explains that he does not hate women and then immediately remembers the maxim that "hate is akin to love."
- He feels a deep connection to Guy, thinking of him as a "brother" and perhaps a bit more:"The bond between Guy and him now was closer than brotherhood. How many brothers liked their brothers as much as he liked Guy?"
- Amusement Park: Miriam is murdered while on a date at an amusement park.
- The Bro Code: Bruno insinuates himself into Guy's social circle by befriending Anne. In a moment of exuberation, he has an urge to kiss her — but decides not to, because she "belong[s] to Guy.""He took great pride in being a perfect gentleman with Anne."
- Engineered Public Confession: A low-key variant. Gerard catches a murderer by guessing that the man is ready to confess to someone, sneaking into his hotel room while he's out, leaving the phone off the hook, and later listening in on the open line while the incriminating conversation happens in the room.
- First Gray Hair: Guy finds his on his eyebrow — which has the effect of reminding the reader of the tiny but shameful scar that's also on his eyebrow, though the narrative never explicitly makes that connection.
- Foil: Guy and Bruno are so similar-yet-opposite that they might as well be from Cheron. It's like they're made up of the same ingredients, but mixed in completely different ways:
- They both drink problematically. But Bruno is The Alcoholic to begin with, while Guy is driven to drink only because of the events of the story.
- Each feels a deep, hard-to-explain connection toward the other. But Bruno's takes the form of obsession that manifests as stalking and harassment, while Guy's takes the form of irrational loyalty that manifests as a refusal to turn against Bruno no matter how much damage he causes.
- Both murder someone. But Bruno does so enthusiastically, with few misgivings beforehand and little conscious remorse afterward, while Guy refuses as long as he can, and is destroyed by guilt after he does give in.
- Good Scars, Evil Scars: Zig-zagged. Guy is injured by branches hitting his face when he flees through the woods after being involved in an act of violence. The resulting scars are small and don't harm his appearance, but he thinks of them as if they were a Mark of Shame. It fits with the book's theme of united opposites: they look like good scars but "feel" like evil scars because Guy is simultaneously a sympathetic protagonist and someone who committed a murder in cold blood.
- Hand Cannon: Bruno, while trying to pressure Guy to kill for him, gives Guy a Luger. Guy thinks it's ridiculously large and clumsy. He ends up using his own (much smaller) handgun instead.
- Homoerotic Subtext: Bruno is Ambiguously Gay and has some kind of fixation on Guy. Guy, meanwhile, regards Bruno with a complex and changeable attitude whose only constant is a sense of loyalty that Guy himself can't explain; at one point his feelings for Bruno are outright described as "love."
- Idiot Ball: A fair amount of the drama could have been easily avoided if Guy had just gone to the police after finding out Bruno killed his ex-wife. If Bruno accused him of conspiracy, Guy could mount an easy defense since there was no exchange of money, no evidence of coercion, the two men had never met before and Bruno's father could've easily testified to his son's general instability, which he probably would have done because he believed Bruno needed help.
- I Need a Freaking Drink:
- Guy plays this straight a few times, in response to Bruno's harassment and his own guilt.
- On one occasion (after Anne's father engages in some Oblivious Guilt Slinging), Guy defies this trope:"He must, he thought, have a brandy or something. But he knew also that he would not take anything."
- Bruno, being The Alcoholic, turns to drink on very slight provocation. But a conventional use of this trope comes when he needs to calm down after killing Miriam.
- Idle Rich: Bruno complains about being kept on a financial leash by his father. But he finds time and money to travel around getting drunk in interesting places, all without having to hold down a job.
- Immune to Drugs: Played for Drama in the second half of the book, when Guy (who's become an increasingly heavy drinker) reflects that it is now "impossible for him to become drunk." This is a realistically downplayed example — he can still feel some effect from alcohol, but drinking too much only makes him sick.
- Informed Attribute: Bruno claims his father is a horrible person, but we have only his word for it. In the novel, the reader knows nothing about Bruno's father right up until Guy kills him, at which point a private detective in Bruno's father's employ tells Bruno that if he honestly thinks his father didn't love him then he really didn't know him at all.
- Kitsch Collection: Charles Bruno's father collects cookie cutters. He never actually makes cookies.
- Momma's Boy: Bruno is very close to his mother and delights in her well-preserved good looks. Meanwhile he loathes his father and plots the old man's death.
- Motive Decay: Done intentionally. At first, Bruno's harassment of Guy is narrowly focused on getting Guy to hold up his end of the bargain Bruno thinks they made. Subsequent events render that motive irrelevant, and Bruno even tells Guy "I'll never see you again" — but it turns out Bruno is so addicted to Guy's presence that he just can't stay away. Basically, he goes from Stalker without a Crush to Stalker with a Crush.
- Murder the Hypotenuse: Bruno very briefly considers doing this with Anne — he's immediately surprised at himself because he genuinely likes Anne and promptly puts the thought out of his mind.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Gerard, the corn-fed Iowan PI, is very good at what he does, but Bruno has a hard time believing it:"Arthur Gerard didn't even look like the kind of a detective who was not supposed to look like a detective."
- Oblivious Guilt Slinging: A dark example. Anne's father is just talking about hunting when he asks if Guy is "any good with a gun." Guy can't very well admit that he's guilt-ridden and traumatized because of something he did with a gun.
- The Perfect Crime: Subverted and played straight:
- Bruno thinks his murder of Miriam is a perfect crime, but he actually gets away with it by pure luck in the short term, while leaving a mess of circumstantial evidence that'll come back to bite him later.
- Another murder in the story actually is well planned, and the murderer gets away undetected even despite some mistakes. It might have gone unsolved if not for some risk-taking in the aftermath: Bruno keeps contacting Guy, and Guy eventually seeks out an opportunity to confess.
- Private Detective: Arthur Gerard is a detective who has worked for Charlie Bruno's father in the past.
- Quick Nip: Bruno carries a hip flask. One of the first things he does when he meets Guy is to offer him a drink.
- Switching P.O.V.: The narrative alternates between Guy's and Bruno's perspectives (and occasionally others). In a few places it "head hops" between them within the same scene, emphasizing the increasing closeness between the two characters and the resulting damage to Guy's sense of self.
- Stalker without a Crush: Charlie Bruno stalks Guy Haines after murdering his wife, in order to try and make Haines fulfill his end of a Murder Swap he never agreed to. After Guy gives in and commits the other murder, Bruno becomes more like a Stalker with a Crush, continuing to intrude on Guy's personal life just because he feels connected to him.
- "Strangers on a Train"-Plot Murder: Trope Namer and unbuilt example. The murder-swap scheme is 100% Bruno's idea; Guy doesn't agree to it, and he doesn't even try to humor Bruno the way his film counterpart does. But eventually, Bruno's campaign of psychological terrorism wears him down.
- Thanatos Gambit: In the opening chapters, Bruno says that if he ever feels like committing suicide, he'll make sure his worst enemy is framed for it. His actual death doesn't reflect this at all.
