Farley Granger and Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train
Dipping into my Mystery Book of Days book, I see that:
19 January 1809
The father of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe, was born in Boston. The book calls him a "notorious gambler, drunkard and opium addict," but this wasn't really true. He certainly had a weakness for alcohol, but all the bad things said about him..well, most of the bad things... were said by his literary executor - whom Poe didn't realize hated him when he made the appointment. After his death - some suspect of rabies, not of alcohol poisoning, this executor did his best to ruin Poe's reputation.
19 January 1921
Patricia Highsmith is born in Texas. She's the author of the book Strangers on a Train (1950), that Alfred Hitchcock made into a movie in 1951 with Farley Granger and Robert Walker. It was her first book. Two men meet on a train. Each wants someone they know, dead. They agree to swap murders, so that they can provide themselves with an alibi for "their" murder, and no one will suspect the other person. (This plot has been used many times since then.)
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