Chain Letters

The scene of the crime in the age of social systems and crime fiction are shown to test out modern distinctions between real and fictitious persons and real reality and fictional reality, and a good way to locating its modes of transmission, observation, and connection: modes of vicarious crime. Via crime stories and crime films, and belief systems such as Scientology, this part details the medium of suspense as a worldview—focusing on one the suspense novel’s great practitioners, Patricia Highsmith, and on one of the suspense motion picture’s great strategists, Alfred Hitchcock. A central focus on the novel and the film Strangers on a Train.