Strangers on a Train

First published in 1950, this crime novel begins when Guy Haines, an architect hoping to divorce, meets Charles Bruno on a train. Bruno proposes a trade of murders: he will kill Guy's wife if Guy will kill Bruno's father, so that neither has an obvious motive. Guy treats the talk as a joke; Bruno does not. The rest of the book follows the pressure of that bargain through New York, the tennis circuit, and Bruno's mother-fixated household. The novel is a psychological thriller about complicity, not a detective puzzle and not a railway mystery in the comic sense.

Bound in dark grey cloth blocked with a design by the artist.