Talk:Strangers on a Train (novel)

Untitled
This page is about the movie not the book. The main character of the book is an architect, not a tennis player.
 * No, about the novel not the film, that is elsewhere. :: Kevinalewis  : (Talk Page) /(Desk)  14:32, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

P.I. Arrest?
First the plot summary describes the detective as a "private detective", then at the end of the summary it says that the detective arrests one of the murderers. How would a P.I. arrest someone? They are not police officers.

Keith Ellington (talk) 14:08, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Unforgotten, series 2
The key plot element of doing another's murder is the basis for the mystery to be solved in Unforgotten, series 2 Marcas.oduinn (talk) 07:58, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

What homosexual subtext?
Both this article & the article on the film currently say that the novel had a homosexual subtext. The source for this claim, McGilligan/ISBN 978-0-06-098827-2, doesn't justify this. It's a book about Hitchcock. There is only one sentence on the subject in the book: "The homoeroticism that Highsmith hinted at in Bruno’s idolization of Guy would be preserved [in Hitchcock's film]." Nothing to explain why Bruno's idolization of Guy is homoerotic, nor any references to other works which explain why it is homoerotic. McGilligan just states it as fact. Personally, I don't see it. Also, earlier in that same paragraph, McGilligan says "Highsmith’s Bruno is a physically repugnant alcoholic" whereas Highsmith actually describes him as having "...an interesting face, though Guy did not know why" and "The skin was smooth as a girl's, even waxenly clear" so maybe McGilligan didn't bother actually reading the novel or something.

Also there's the part in chapter 12, just after Bruno has killed Miriam, where "He was just heading for a man standing by the door, to ask directions--he knew he shouldn't go there in a taxi--when he realized he wanted a woman. He wanted a woman more than ever before in his life, and that he did pleased him prodigiously. He hadn't wanted one since he got to Santa Fe, though twice Wilson had gotten him into it." So since meeting Guy (like two weeks, give or take), he's gone to bed with two women, and now he really wants to go to bed with a third. Sounds super-gay to me.

McGilligan does cite Carringer/doi:10.1632/s0030812900105255 (which is indirectly cited in the article on the film), which might seem to discuss the issue, but I can't tell. I couldn't get a copy of Carringer's original article, but I could get a letter to the editor by one Mervyn Nicholson about the piece & Carringer's reply (doi:10.1632/pmla.2001.116.5.1448) in the same journal. Neither author discusses the novel, only the film.

In any case, it seems to me that allegedly notorious homosexual subtext of Highsmith's novel is not established, so I'm going to take it out of both articles. Feel free to put it back in if there's an actual good source for it though. Dingsuntil (talk) 10:07, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks to the timely receipt of a Wikipedia Library Card, I was able to get my hands on Carringer's article and can confirm that it is entirely about film, has no interest in the novel apart from pointing out what Hitchcock changed, and provides no evidence for the claim that the novel had homosexual subtext other than a single vague assertion: "Highsmith’s Bruno is physically repugnant in the extreme, an acute alcoholic, indifferently heterosexual, almost boyish in his admiration of Guy." I guess we know where McGilligan's strange description of Bruno came from now. In any case, only the last of those four points is accurate, although personally I would argue that Bruno is portrayed as just "almost boyish" in general. Given that Carringer immediately goes on to say that "Guy is defined almost solely by material objects he covets and his architectural ambitions" I wonder if he bothered to read the novel either, since this statement is comically inaccurate. The only passage in the book which lends any support to "indifferently heterosexual" is the passage I quoted above from chapter 12. Normally if you said that someone was indifferently heterosexual, I would assume you were were using the word "indifferent" in the sense of "impartial" or "capable of development in more than one direction" as in the passage from Barry Lyndon "He speaks Italian or French indifferently; but we have some reason to fancy this Monsieur de Balibari is a native of your country of Ireland." In other words, you were calling him bisexual. In fact, the correct description (which may have bean what Carringer meant) would be "He is heterosexual, although sometimes when he has sex with women he is indifferent to it, but on the other hand sometimes he is not" (or as I would put it: "He is heterosexual"). It's possible that Carringer just made a poor choice of words, McGilligan misunderstood it, and things just went downhill from there. Anyhow, I think it's clear that neither author is a reliable source for the specifics of the novel, so whether they asserted it had a homosexual subtext doesn't matter. Dingsuntil (talk) 05:38, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Homosexual subtext in Warner adaptation
The claim that Craig Warner's adaptations contain homosexual subtext is sourced to McGilligan. While I see no reason to doubt that the subtext is there, this is not reflected in McGilligan's book as far as I could tell. Not just the page cited in the article; from McGilligan's entire chapter on 1950-1953 (in which that page lies) to the end of the book, all occurrences of the string "Warner" are references to Warner Bros or Jack Warner. Dingsuntil (talk) 08:33, 2 June 2022 (UTC)