STRANGERS ON A TRAIN

(The difficulties mentioned below are equally true for Strangers on a Plane, Strangers on a Bus, and Strangers on a Park Bench.)

Individuals routinely contact me excitedly about the Strangers on a Train stratagem, mistakenly believing that it is not cliché, flawed, or detectable. Thus, I feel compelled to address this, if for no other reason than to debunk it.

Why this is a stupid idea and not even included The Perfect Murder: for Imbeciles:

To begin with, this plot device is taken from the title of a film, Strangers on a Train, by Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock created this black and white film as a psychological thriller and released it in 1951.  (If you've not seen it already, go out and see it.  It's a superb film, but don't equate that with it being a great training film--unless you're a film student.)  Since then, it seems, everyone thinks Strangers on a Train is the perfect murder, assuming I guess, that the police have not also seen it. By now, it’s been remade and refashioned so many times that even the densest cop has heard of the idea (Throw Mama from the Train inevitably enlightened many of the dimmer bulbs to this strategy). If you are going to base a murder on a film, pick a French movie from the 60s. No one has seen them, and even if they had, they’d have no idea what they’d seen.

The Strangers on a Train ploy depends on the truth of one unspoken idea: enough people want someone dead badly enough that whenever you sit down, you have at least a 75% chance of meeting one. Do seventy-five percent of us actually want to kill someone? If the following of this blog is any indication, then that just might be true. (Of course, the corollary to this theorem would be that there is then a great likelihood that the majority of us are on someone else’s hit list.)

Now, if your partner does agree with your plan (and not rat you out to the cops), you are faced with having a partner who is either a potential liar or a potential murderer. Let me explain. If s/he actually kills your desired target, you are trusting a murderer with your freedom. If s/he doesn’t, then you are trusting a liar with your freedom. If your partner is a liar, then s/he chose not to kill either out of guilt, fear, or cowardice, in whichever case the odds of his/her confessing are greatly increased. If you partner is intentionally lying, then you are being set up and will definitely go to jail.

The way to get around its weakness is to set the scenario up, let your partner kill the one you want dead (make sure you have a good but not too blatant alibi), and then kill your partner. Oh yeah, and take the gun that he used to kill your desired target and recycle it (see Killing Green). Make sure you don’t kill the person he wanted dead--if s/he wanted that person dead that much, the target probably wanted him/her dead too, making the target a perfect patsy.  Now, as long as no one makes a successful movie out of this ploy, we should be able to use it for quite some time.