Cassie McCullough

Great to have you too.

Now, your latest play, Berlin, has just finished at the Melbourne Theatre Company.

And among your many plays, you've also written one about the dying days of Patricia Highsmith.

It's called Switzerland.

How did you come to write that?

Fantastic.

Gosh, we have to ask you, Michael Rowbotham, who would you like to have your characters like to be done away with by?

Richard Bradford, the author of Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires, The Life of Patricia Highsmith.

Well, OK, well, why don't we get on to the fiction itself?

And let's start with, well, at the very beginning with Strangers on a Train from 1950, which was adapted just a year later by none other than Alfred Hitchcock.

Bruno and Guy meeting on a train in the Hitchcock adaptation of Strangers on a Train.

I love that film.

The book is different though, Michael.

It's a pretty deceptively simple concept.

Two strangers with no apparent motive commit these murders and it's all done away with, but it's never that easy, is it, Kate?

That's right, yeah.

What about you, Michael?

I mean, how do you see this story?

But you touched on the relationship between Guy and Bruno.

Bruno is, well, he's Iago.