Girls, Strangers & Trains
A good writer is a good reader. That means keeping both an eye on the latest publishing trends and also widening your knowledge of your genre’s greats. For any aspiring crime writer, two books worth exploring are a pair of debut novels published sixty five years apart: Patricia Highsmith’s ‘Strangers on a Train’ (1950) and Paula Hawkins’ ‘The Girl on The Train’ (2015).
There are plenty of parallels between the two books, and not just from the their titles. ‘The Girl on the Train’, this season’s hot new bestselling crime novel, has got some fantastic quotes – Terry Hayes, for example, has described it as ‘Alfred Hitchcock for a new generation’ and the rights have been snapped up by Dreamworks. Sixty-five years ago, the original Alfred Hitchcock was purchasing the film rights to ‘Strangers on a Train’ by Patricia Highsmith.
Both novels, too, have a clarity to their pitch that is immediately compelling: in Highsmith’s story, two strangers meet on a train, agree to kill for each other, hence making the crimes untraceable. In Hawkins’ tale, the train also defines the structure, with each chapter set up with a ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ section to mirror the daily commute. Like another Hitchcock film, ‘Rear Window’, it is what the protagonist observes that sets the story in motion.
Yet in two striking ways, the books could be more different. Highsmith’s book was something genuinely new and different, whereas Hawkins’ book is one steeped in modern publishing. The patronising ‘girl’ in the title feels a clear nod towards the mega-success of Gillian Flynn’s novel (she’s not alone – other recent crime ‘girls’ can be found ‘in a red coat’, ‘with a clock for a heart’ or ‘a dragon tattoo’). The protagonist, meanwhile, follows the current vogue for unreliable narrators –SJ Watson did it expertly with it memory loss in ‘Before I Go To Sleep’, Hawkins uses a mixture of alcoholism and black outs here. And as with ‘Gone Girl’ and Lucie Whitehouse’s ‘Before We Met’, Hawkins also throws in the ‘You thought you knew someone’ plot card as well.
That’s a good hand of cards to play and Hawkins plays them well. Highsmith’s story, by contrast, contains no such chicanery or sleights of hand to steer the reader off course. She knows that she has enough in both her premise and her characters for the story to play out straight, yet remain every bit as compelling.
That’s the second difference between the two books: the complexity of the characters. In both cases, the authors have come up with a cast list of unlikeable individuals. That’s always a challenge for a writer to pull off: if the reader doesn’t care about the characters, then however strong the plot is, they might not read on. Care, which new writers sometimes fail to appreciate, is different to like: a protagonist can be as unpleasant as anything as long as they intrigue the reader and compel them to continue.
For me, the most interesting element of Highsmith’s book, ultimately is not the novel’s original narrative premise, arresting that it is. Instead, it is more that once the murderous deeds have been done, the focus shifts to the effect this has on the characters. That psychological element of the guilt gnawing away is what makes the second half of the book. TS Eliot famously praised the playwright Webster for seeing ‘the skull beneath the skin’. Highsmith goes one further, and unlocks the psyche within the skull.
By contrast, Paula Hawkins’ book, along with the Gillian Flynn novel that it echoes, remains very much skin deep. And because of that, the characters don’t engage in the same way. By the end of both books, for all their various plotting strengths, I didn’t care what happened to the characters and could have put either of them down (in ‘Gone Girl’, if you know how that finishes, I wish I had!).
It doesn’t have to be this way, but that seems to be the trend for many of the books in this latest crime sub-genre – the stories and concepts are sharp (and the plotting of ‘Gone Girl’ with its interweaving double strand narrative is structurally superb), but the unpleasant and unreliable lead characters don’t grip and grab as they could.
Patricia Highsmith might not have pulled off the plot tricks and reveals of her present day successors. Equally, she might not be piled high on the front table of the bookshops these days (last month I bought three of her novels, recently republished as Virago Modern Classics, for five pounds in a bargain bookshop). But she had an understanding of malevolence that any writer wanting to be the next Paula Hawkins would do well to explore.