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Her first novel, ‘Strangers on a Train’, published in 1950, begins with one of the great poisonous ideas in crime fiction. Two men meet by chance. One suggests that they swap murders, each killing the person the other wants gone. It is an outrageous premise, but Highsmith makes it feel horribly possible because she understands how quickly a passing thought can become a moral infection. Alfred Hitchcock adapted the book in 1951, but the novel’s real terror lies not in the plot. It lies in the intimacy of temptation.