The most recommended Alfred Hitchcock books

Bernard Herrmann is revered as one of the movies' greatest composers.

Imagine starting your Hollywood career with music for Citizen Kane!

He enjoyed a very productive 10-year relationship with director Alfred Hitchcock, which produced such masterpieces as Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest; he also worked with Francois Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451, composed the original Twilight Zone theme, and capped his career with music for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Yet he could be cantankerous and difficult, antagonizing both friends and colleagues with his temperamental behavior and insistence upon the highest standards of music and drama.

I love the fact that Smith writes as well about the music as he does about the composer, and the reader walks away knowing lots about both.

This is a great novella based on a specific incident in the young Alfred Hitchcock's life which subsequently forms the backbone for his demeanor, interests, films, and philosophy. Fictionalised biography can come under criticism for not being accurate and it's true that some factual accuracy is put aside here but that's not to the detriment of story. Volk doesn't put a foot wrong in tone, characterisation, or prose. This is an engaging, compelling work that illuminates Hitchcock in the same way that Joyce Carol Oates' Blonde illuminates Monroe or John Connolly's He does the same for Stan Laurel. Thoroughly enjoyed it. This version is no longer available, but it forms part of The Dark Masters trilogy featuring similar characterisations of the actor Peter Cushing and writer Aleister Crowley which is also highly recommended.

Ever since I heard the words how a long knife had ‘skewered’ Scudder to the floor, I was hooked on Buchan’s classic story and became a devote of Richard Hannay. When I say I heard it, it is because a teacher read it to us at school when they used to do things like that. The chase around the Highlands of Scotland remains one of the greatest pieces of spy writing. You can feel the ingenuity and sheer effort Hannay has to put into his quest to avoid capture and find the 39 Steps.

I have read the book many times since, and it has stood the test of time with flying colors. In many respects, it should be the starting point for the aspiring espionage writer.

If one wants to learn about Hitchcock’s complex relation with women, one can turn to Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius or Laurence Leamer’s recent Hitchcock’s Blondes, but if one wants to contemplate the aesthetic question, how are women portrayed in Hitchcock, Modleski is far more rewarding.

I learned much from her weighing of Hitchcock’s ambivalence toward women. The book offers a strong feminist account of seven films, and I have consistently recommended it to my students as one of the best books on Hitchcock. 

This book, for me, stands alongside The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a necessary stepping stone toward all modern 'dark double' fiction. I actually first encountered the book via one of its looser adaptations, The Man Who Haunted Himself, starring Roger Moore. I must have seen that some time in the 70s, and it stuck with me across five decades without losing its core power. The Armstrong original, written in 1940 then expanded later, is still a legitimately creepy tale, particularly in terms of the questions it refuses to answer. Watching Pelham's slow-motion collapse into paranoia and chaos is a genuinely uneasy experience, like seeing The Picture of Dorian Gray through the eyes of the portrait itself.

My first experience reading a book with dual storylines, this novel held me spellbound cover to cover. McMahon has since become an auto-buy author for me, thanks to this fantastical story that puts a magnifying glass on the life of two sisters, a childhood friend, and an unexplained disappearance. The story moves between past and present and revolves around the Tower Motel in Vermont, now a ruined shell that refuses to yield its secrets. Secrets the girls discovered while playing games there as children. 

An unexpected splash of the paranormal and the use of letters from one sister to Mr. Hitchcock (yes, that Hitchcock) add the perfect touch to this disturbing gem.

These stories were picked out by the master of suspense, himself, Alfred Hitchcock. These stories are both horrific and suspenseful. With tales involving a flesh-eating troll, something creepy lurking about in the woods that kills anything that comes into its path, and an uninvited odd boy that comes to a party with evil intentions, one will not be able to put this book down. It might even make you want to leave the lights on during the night.

Dorothy B. Hughes wrote one of my favorite 20th century noirs, A Lonely Place. This less well known book, though published in 1963, had incredible resonance today based on where we are socially and politically--I can't say more than that because what gives it that resonance are several spoilers.

Who can resist a story of reinvention? We certainly can’t. Alfred Hitchcock’s reputation as the Master of Suspense was secure when Rebello began telling his story. But Hitch, the artist, wanted to continue challenging himself creatively, while Hitch, the businessman, understood that audience tastes were changing as the 1960s dawned.

With Psycho (1960), he risked everything to tell an unexpected, transgressive story. Rebello reveals that, by changing how he made movies, Hitchcock changed the movies entirely. As Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho spawned the film, Rebello’s meticulous history became the movie Hitchcock (2012).

In the mid-‘60s, acclaimed Irish-Canadian novelist Brian Moore unhappily spent time grappling with the script problems plaguing director Alfred Hitchcock’s 1966 spy thriller Torn Curtain. In this frankly autobiographical 1971 novel, a Hitchcock-esque producer comes in for knocks when a Moore-like novelist-screenwriter gets lured to Hollywood to work on the screenplay for a famous moviemaker’s next film. (Moore described his brush with Hitchcock as “awful, like washing floors.”) Waiting to learn whether he’s going to be forced to do another script rewrite, the novelist agonizes over his ongoing divorce and his relationship with his new girlfriend. Mostly, though, he’s confronted by the ghosts of friends and family members past, notably his father’s. So sharply funny, painfully honest a book that one almost wishes Hitchcock had filmed it instead of Torn Curtain.