Strangers on a train: New comic thriller ‘The Commuter’

• Croton journalist Patrick Oster has a new novel out this month, “The Commuter”
• Thriller tells story of laid-off office-worker who tracks the lives of his fellow Metro-North riders
• Oster, an editor at Bloomberg, drew on his experiences of riding the 6:19 a.m. train to Grand Central

If you’ve ever been on a crowded Metro-North train, you know the rules. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t talk to the stranger sitting next to you or, even worse, trail him when the train doors open.

Especially if that stranger has a secret that could draw you into tangled a web of intrigue.

That’s the premise behind Patrick Oster’s new novel, “The Commuter.” The 245-page comic thriller, published this month by Perseus Books Group and available on Amazon.com, tells the story of Barnaby Gilbert, a laid-off office worker and avid birder who spends his newfound free time tracking the clandestine (and criminal) lives of his fellow riders.

In writing the “The Commuter,” Oster, 69, a managing editor at Bloomberg News, drew on his experiences of riding the 6:19 a.m. train from Croton-Harmon to Grand Central each morning.

“I got the idea basically commuting to work,” Oster said during a recent interview, seated on a deck outside the Hunter Place cottage he shares with his wife, Sally Jacobsen, a deputy-managing editor at the Associated Press, and two Airedale dogs, Razzmatazz and Gemma. “I’d would see some of the same people all the time. And I just started thinking, ‘Well, where do they go?’”

He added: “I finally decided it would be interesting to have a character do what I’d always wondered about — follow people on the train.”

One thing leads to another, and, before long, Barnaby finds himself involved in counterfeit luxury goods ring on Canal Street, the city’s epicenter of knockoffs. Other plot-lines follow a sex-addicted F.B.I. agent, an Eastern European hacker and a high-class dominatrix.

“It might seem that the people Barnaby Gilbert encountered in his dangerous hobby are a bit over-the-top, even for a work of fiction,” Oster writes in the book’s afterward. “But you don’t have to scratch hard in a city that supposedly has 8 million stories to find it teeming with the sort of players in Barnaby’s tale.”

Oster compared Barnaby to Chance, the holy fool of Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There.”

“He’s kind of clueless in some ways,” Oster said. “He stumbles into a lot of trouble. In the end, everyone wants a piece of him.”

A native of Chicago who still speaks with a trace of Midwest twang, Oster graduated from Cornell Law School and got his start in journalism covering criminal courts for The Chicago Sun-Times in 1973. He covered the White House during the Carter and Reagan years and worked as a foreign correspondent in Latin America during the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

He and his wife moved to Croton in 1996 with their son. The village is home to a number of writers including Malcom Jones (“Little Boy Blues”), Roger Kahn (“The Boys of Summer”); and crime novelist Maggie Barbieri.

The novel was more than 10 years in the making. After moving to Bloomberg from Businessweek in 2001, Oster decided to dust off an old manuscript he’d worked off and on. He’d previously published non-fiction book, “The Mexicans: A Personal Portrait of a People,” after a stint in Mexico City with Knight-Ridder.

“The writing juices started flowing again,” he said. “But it took my a while. The main thing is, I spent a lot of time doing the writing and the re-writing. People have asked me, ‘How do you do it?’ The key secret is keeping your butt in the chair.”

Oster wrote much of “The Commuter” on his Mac laptop on — you guessed it — commuter trains and during weekends and vacations.

He showed early drafts to co-workers at Bloomberg and to a local reading group in Croton, drawing inspiration from the work of spy writers John le Carré and Len Deighton, and “Elmore Leonard for his dialogue.”

Oster’s next novel, “The German Club,” is due in November. The spy-thriller draws on Oster’s time covering the fall of the Berlin Wall for The Daily News, and three or four more books are in the pipeline.

“A lot of the stuff that I’m writing involves real-life events that I covered or my reporters covered when I became an editor,” he said.

Now that he’s published his first novel, Oster conceded there’s a chance he might spy a fellow Metro-North passenger paging through “The Commuter” on the train. Then again, maybe not.

“I think it’s more likely these days that I might see somebody reading it an iPad,” he said wryly. “That or ‘Fifty Shades of Grey.’”

Twitter: @alextailored