Books like The Hitchcock Romance — picked by fans

With the exception of the prefatory material, which one can skip, this is one of the very best books on Hitchcock.

It is beautifully written and attentive to cinematic details and larger themes. It offers rich interpretations of several central films, with the first half focused on close interpretation and the second half, written later in Wood’s career, more orientated toward Marx, Freud, and gay studies.

Though the book is uneven, it contains some of the best analyses one will ever read of Hitchcock’s major films.

Probably the #1 challenge for me as a mystery writer is holding the readers’ attention and keeping them engaged from Page One to The End. The answer is: create suspense. Keep the reader wondering What’s going to happen next. Ask unanswered questions. Not so much “Whodunnit?” but the more complex: “What’s going on here?”

This book contains interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, the premier master of suspense, talking to the great director Francois Truffaut and dissecting the how-to of creating suspense. His examples and explanations made me truly understand the choices I make when I structure a plot, a scene, or even a moment in the book. Do I want the reader to inhale or exhale or gasp, and why does it matter?  

How can one take the tradition of feminist film studies (instigated by Laura Mulvey’s ‘the male gaze’ essay) seriously and at the same time be hooked to the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock?

Tania Modleski had set herself the task in this 1988 study to combine these two positions that, for a long time, seemed mutually exclusive. Whereas Mulvey had mentioned that the flashback in Hitchcock’s Vertigo was an exception that had proven the rule (of a cinema of patriarchy), Modleski reversed this by making the exceptions as such the rule in Hitchcock’s work. She thus ended up not condemning Hitchcock’s presumed patriarchal attitude but uncovering his ambivalence.

In her readings, she convincingly explains that it is not just a matter of desiring female characters but also identifying with them among others because of their cleverness.

Music is essential to the meaning of film, and I couldn’t get enough of this book.

Despite its narrower focus, it is a superior work, on a level with the best Hitchcock volumes. If music and film interest you, you will benefit from it. Moreover, Sullivan covers almost half of Hitchcock’s more than 50 films.

Blake’s book explores the way in which a distinctly Catholic sensibility shaped the cinematic imaginations of Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, John Ford, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma.

Blake’s point is not that these filmmakers were pious or even believers. He does demonstrate, though, that the Catholic cultures in which these filmmakers grew up significantly influenced both the stories they told and the images they created.

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.

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).

Sheila Kohler, a mentor of mine whose work is featured in this thrilling collection, is fond of saying that suspense arises from putting a vulnerable character in a dangerous situation. A literary writer of the highest caliber, Sheila knows how to generate the suspense that keeps the page turning. Crime fiction has a long history going back to Dostoevsky and beyond, to the great tragedians—the commission of a crime entails motive, means, and is inherently dramatic. This eclectic selection of mystery and female noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, features superstar writers like Edwidge Danticat, Margaret Atwood, Sheila Kohler, Elizabeth McCracken, and Joyce Carol Oates herself. The writing is luminous, the themes are varied—from domestic horror to the erotic to dark fairy tales—and the tales keep the reader turning the page.

This is another great diamond yarn where the movie by Alfred Hitchcock is better known than the book. A series of high-end robberies is plaguing the French Riviera. Police suspect that retired jewel thief John “The Cat” Robie may not be as retired as he claims. They come to arrest him. Robie escapes. To prove his innocence, he persuades an insurance broker to give him a list of the wealthiest diamond owners on the Cote d’Azur, so he can intercept and apprehend the new “Cat” committing the robberies, and thus clear his name. On the list is a wealthy American, with whose daughter, played by Grace Kelly, Robie develops a romance. The plot plays out in the ravishing landscape, but the real message is the diamond industry’s favorite—that owning diamonds makes you part of a glamorous world.

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.