Strangers on a train

According to her own notebook, the idea for Strangers on a Train came to its author, Patricia Highsmith, in December 1945, while she was walking along the Hudson River in upstate New York with her mother, Mary Coates, and her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith. Given her fractious relationship with her mother, it is not surprising that the idea for a novel – two people swapping murders – came while in the company of the woman she thought of as her lifelong enemy. Divorced from Patricia’s father nine days before she was born in 1921, Mary spent most of her daughter’s childhood courting a new suitor, Stanley.