Mistaken for No One

The particular iteration of the speed of suspense addressed in Chapter 1 involves the means by which modern railway travel generates collisions among anonymous subjects or commuters. In two mid-century thrillers, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1950) and Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man (1948), the phenomenology of accidental encounter finds intense though differently inflected dramatization. Developing murder plots from the starting point of the contingencies of social interaction, both Highsmith and Woolrich advance narratives adapted to the dynamics of enhanced mobility. The authors put their respective conflicts “in motion” to explore the provocative motifs of the exchange of subject positions and the transfer of identities.