Modern Classics: Patricia Highsmith

Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and the Making of Modern Psychological Suspense

As Raymond Chandler is to hardboiled detectives or John le Carré is to spy novels, Patricia Highsmith is the godmother of the modern psychological thriller genre. Like these masters, Highsmith elevated what could be dismissed as a purely-for-entertainment genre into a true literary form and in the process became an inspiration for countless writers who came after her.

Recent years have seen a renewed appreciation for Highsmith—in 2021 a collection of her letters and notebooks were published to wide acclaim, as well as a new biography. But if you’re like me, Highsmith is a name that you have probably heard, have maybe even had on your to-read list, but have never found the time to get to. The catalyst that caused me to take these novels off the pile, finally, was Hitchcock’s adaptation of Strangers on a Train. Between its premise and its director, Strangers felt like a must-watch film but turned a little ridiculous and sort of fun but in a bad/good way. Melodramatic and with a real lack of mystery, the film does not do proper justice to the core idea of the premise and its potential: two strangers meet and agree to commit the perfect crime by killing for each other.

Fast-forward a few months, and in a bit of kismet, I received a book on submission that reinvents Strangers on a Train to maximize this famous what if… The book, which I eventually acquired and edited, Kill for Me, Kill for You by Steve Cavanagh, succeeds where Hitchcock didn’t, by taking Highsmith’s premise, setting it in modern times, and giving the two strangers very compelling, almost-morally-justifiable reasons to want someone else dead.

Naturally, I began to wonder why Cavanagh had been so drawn to Highsmith. Having seen the adaptations of her two most popular works—Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley­—but not read the books, I set out to understand why Highsmith’s works are considered modern classics.

Crime and Punishment

Although the films stray very far from their source material, especially in terms of storytelling structure, the same thing can be said about Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train as Highsmith’s: it has a fantastic premise that is woefully underutilized. The great what if of Strangers on a Train—what if two strangers plan to commit the perfect murder?—is discarded almost immediately in both the film and the book. Contrary to what the tagline may lead you to believe, the two central characters don’t really share a murder plot together. One of the strangers, Bruno, is fairly creepy, unhinged, and untrustworthy from the start. Meanwhile, Guy, the second stranger, is in a bad marriage with a cheating wife who he’d like to be rid of, but is never near ready to agree to Bruno’s grand scheme of “swapping murders.” In Highsmith’s Strangers, Bruno violates the premise and blows the cover for the perfect murder about 40 pages into the novel (something that happens so early on that it doesn’t feel like it needs a spoiler alert) when he leaves a massive paper trail by writing multiple letters to Guy and ruins the whole “strangers” thing. That holds true for the film as well. In all, Guy is more stalked and harassed by Bruno more than he is in cahoots with him.

To a modern reader or viewer, this understandably will cause some dissatisfaction and may upset your expectations of a great plot based on the tagline. All-in-all, Highsmith is far more interested in the psychological part of the psychological thriller equation than the thriller part. The real premise she explores is not how the perfect murders could be executed by two strangers, but why an ordinary person might be driven to murder under psychological duress. It doesn’t take a deep textual reading or reading her biography to ascertain this authorial intention. After all, she named the main character Guy.

Although Highsmith developed the building blocks of the psychological thriller, the disconnect for the modern reader when reading Strangers comes from the fact that the genre has become something quite different in the years since Highsmith’s novel was first published in 1950. We already covered some of this ground in discussing In Cold Blood and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, two true crime modern classics that showed the evolution in the availability of information and subsequent style change from the middle of the 20th century to the early 21st in the true crime genre. The psychological thriller has undergone a similar evolution. Firstly, the compacting of writing style (by today’s standards one might consider passages in Strangers on a Train, like some in In Cold Blood, to be overly explanatory and discursive). However, whereas our increase in scientific knowledge has made writers and readers more savvy in the true crime space—we are certainly more sophisticated at unpacking the anatomy of a crime—our increase in scientific knowledge has had a slightly different effect in imaginative crime writing. More knowledge has meant, somewhat un-intuitively, that the modern fiction crime writer and reader have tended to care far less about psychology and science. Now the innerworkings of the mind have become the subject of academic study not fiction.

We no longer rely—as a society, and therefore as readers— on novelists to untangle our thorniest of moral questions: why do people kill? But Highsmith’s novels set out to answer this question, making them much closer to Crime and Punishment than any psychological thriller you can pick up off of the new release table today. Viewed this way, Highsmith offers a kind of bridge to the modern iteration of the genre, as novels like Strangers on a Train fall somewhere between the full interiority of a literary novelist and the action-driven crime novels of today. Highsmith’s fantastic devices and ideas for plots portended where the genre was going, but whether for lack of tools or just plain interest, these premises are not given nearly as much space and effort as are her characters and their minds.

Strangers on a Train resembles In Cold Blood in more respects than just being a work by a master who laid genre foundations for writers that came after. Showcasing Highsmith’s brilliance Strangers depicts the type of ordinary people who commit awful crimes ten years earlier than Capote does in his “true” version of a similar case study of two murderers. Bruno, like the real killers Dick and Perry in Capote’s nonfiction book, is an alcoholic and seems to have suffered from abuse as a child, which is the beginnings of the serial killer pathology that would be formalized in the 1970s. Highsmith’s Bruno is not a hyper-intelligent serial killer, but a dull and clumsy one. Someone who commits murder in an intoxicated and chaotic fashion. If you haven’t read Strangers on a Train yet, prepare yourself less for a twisty thriller and more for a novel about a stalker and a regular man’s decent into mania. Guy is Bruno’s obsession, and Strangers is primarily concerned with how through the constant pressures of Bruno’s harassment Guy takes on more and more of the behaviors of Bruno: the drinking, the inability to form relationships, and the delusion. Guy and Bruno’s relationship mirrors the one between Dick and Perry in In Cold Blood, where the overwhelming force and depravity of one man drags out the worst in the other.

The main shift since Highsmith and Capote pioneered these forms has been a greater emphasis on the thriller part of psychological thrillers. Writers now tend focus more on the how rather than the why, a sensibility likely shared by readers whose preference is for plot mechanics rather than interior psychologizing. Take the book that set into motion our decades-long resurgence in the psychological thriller genre: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (likely the subject of another modern classic post down the road). This novel is built around an elaborate structure and story twists (one big twist is particularly famous). It is a highly preceptive and observational novel and, tellingly to this overall shift toward plot, the psychological side of Gone Girl falls more into the category of social dynamics—marriage, relationships, gender—rather than focusing on its killer’s pathologies.

In the 20th century Strangers on a Train is a novel answering the question of how a normal guy is driven to murder; in the 20st century Strangers on a Train would be a novel answering the question of how two strangers try to get away with the perfect murder with a dash of social commentary thrown in.

Why Writers Still Love Patricia Highsmith

Sometimes in music the biggest hits are also the songs that are critically lauded and hipster certified—Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark”, The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”, Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” Such is Patricia Highsmith’s masterpiece. If Strangers on a Train falls short in a thriller sense, why do writers still come back to Patricia Highsmith as a touchpoint for modern psychological suspense? Look no further than The Talented Mr. Ripley.

What works in Ripley’s favor is that, unlike Strangers on a Trian, it’s not a novel that rests on the premise of its plot or a what if question. While there are plenty of plot points in The Talented Mr. Ripley, it’s hard to argue that any of Ripley’s murdering or police evasion is the main engine of The Talented Mr. Ripley (although those capers are nicely pulled off by Highsmith—one could really assume a different identity a lot easier in the days of post offices and landline telephones). What is enduring about Highsmith’s most famous novel is that all of her talents for psychological interiority and morality are funneled into the creation of one of the most compelling anti-heroes and con men of all-time. Ripley is a full-on character study. Tom Ripley is such a captivating character because of his talents—mainly his high-functioning sociopathy—that the whole novel is spent following Tom as he gets himself in and out of one bad situation after another, by any means necessary.

In the same way that Hitchcock captured the poor qualities of Strangers but fundamentally changed the structure of Highsmith’s novel, so did the film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow, capture the stellar qualities of its source material while also changing the structure. With performances that match and even elevate the source material—for instance, Dickie’s girlfriend Marge, played by Paltrow, is given a much larger role than she has in the book—the film captures the electric scenes, enhanced by the visuals and performances, of some of the most uncanny and unnerving moments in the book. Ripley finding Dickie and Marge for the first time on the beach while still wearing his dress shoes. Dickie walking in on Ripley dressing up and pretending to be him stands out in both versions as one of the most layered and evocative scenes.  

Where the movie strays in a very significant way is the explicit connection between Ripley’s homosexuality and his murderous rage. The “depraved homosexual” has long been a loathsome tv/film troupe (one that Hitchcock also made more central in his adaptation of  Strangers on a Train!). But where the otherwise excellent film fails by fully indulging this noxious and reductive trope, Highsmith’s much more subtle touch and novelists’ sensibility shines. Although Ripley, it would seem, is queer in some way from the novel, Highsmith never explicitly spells out his sexuality. Highsmith leaves Ripley’s motivations and character clear but unanswerable, as wonderfully up for interpretation in the 21st century as it was in the 20th.  This is exemplary of the timeless quality of Highsmith’s writing and her mastery of the form. It’s no wonder she would go on to write a total of five Ripley books over her career. It’s also no surprise after reading Ripley why writers come back to Highsmith again and again and why some of our most iconic murderous characters—from Hannibal Lector, to Patrick Bateman, to Amy Dunne—can be traced, in some ways, back to Highsmith’s trailblazing work.