Guy Haines, a tennis star who hates his wife, is approached on a train by a stranger, Bruno Anthony, who hates his father. Anthony offers a plan: each could kill the other's victim. No motive, no clue would link the two murders save the casual meeting of strangers on a train.

Arrogant, irascible, and misogynistic professor of phonetics Henry Higgins believes that the accent and tone of one's voice determines a person's prospects in society. He boasts to a new acquaintance, Colonel Hugh Pickering--also an expert in phonetics--that he could teach any woman to speak so "properly" that he could pass her off as a duchess at an embassy ball. He chooses as an example a sassy, young working-class London flower seller from the...