Talk:Strangers on a Train (novel)

message: 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)
thread_title: Untitled

message: 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)
thread_title:  P.I. Arrest? 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Unforgotten, series 2 

message: 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)
thread_title:  What homosexual subtext? 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Homosexual subtext in Warner adaptation