There are probably more film books devoted to Alfred Hitchcock and his work than to any other director in cinema history. Nevertheless, this abundance of critical reflections on an endlessly fascinating film-maker does not make Peter Conrad's scholarly and consistently absorbing The Hitchcock Murders any the less welcome. The book's jacket is aptly illustrated with a still from one of the most famous and most widely discussed sequences in popular culture - a close-up of Janet Leigh's screaming mouth from the shower scene in Psycho. Conrad, an author, cultural critic and regular columnist for the Observer, begins the book by tracing his evident obsession with Hitchcock back to the time he first saw Psycho, in 1961 as a 13-year-old boy in his native Tasmania.
As he outlines his carefully devised scheme to get out of school and get into a matinee of this film, legally prohibited to his age group, Conrad gleefully compares his plotting to the guilty behaviour of several protagonists in Hitchcock's work, not least the Marion Crane character played by Janet Leigh in Psycho, who surreptitiously takes an afternoon off with such fatal consequences.
So begins what Conrad describes as "a voyage around the idiosyncratic universe inside Hitchcock's head", and so it continues as he delves deep into a trove of learning to cross-reference Hitchcock's films with each other, with the literary sources he so often altered radically for the screen, and with a succession of connections that invoke Plato, Shakespeare, Wagner, Brecht, Dali, Genet, Orwell, Cocteau, Hemingway and, inevitably, Freud - to cite but a few. There are salient references, too, to the films of other directors, most notably Robert Lepage's 1995 Canadian film, The Confessional, which featured Hitchcock himself as a character and drew explicity on his 1953 drama of secrecy and guilt, I Confess.
The result is neither ostentatious nor pretentious, but driven by Conrad's undisguised passion for his subject. Conrad has clearly seen Hitchcock's movies over and over again, to the point where this accumulation of references flows with ease, exerting a compelling hold on the reader as he cuts between them, spinning an enthralling web that proves lucid, illuminating and accessible. Many of these associations are inspired, as when Conrad suggests that Mrs Danvers, the daunting housekeeper of Rebecca, and Mrs Bates, the mother of the unhinged Norman in Psycho, were "sisters under the skin". Or when Conrad observes that "Vertigo is the story of Pygmalion in reverse: a man who wants a live woman to be a statue."
If there is a significant flaw in what Conrad describes as "my grateful fan letter to the bogeyman", it is that his sheer enthusiasm for the subject places some undue weight on the lesser works in Hitchcock's canon and their apparent significance in the contexts raised. And in his zeal, Conrad at times exaggerates the significance of relatively trivial or innocuous scenes or lines of dialogue. Conrad eschews taking a chronological approach to Hitchcock's productions as firmly as he rejects the ideology and jargon of film theory, wondering "if any of these conscientious axe-grinders, who value Vertigo only as `a proving ground for a complex array of theories', has paused to notice how deliriously beautiful and achingly sad it is". The title of The Hitchcock Murders, and the sub-division of its 19 essays into three principal sections - The Art of Murder, The Technique of Murder and The Religion of Murder - focus on Conrad's primary area of interest in Hitchcock. "Gradually," he says, "I came to understand Hitchcock's surreal genius: he knew how to rescind reality, and to make you afraid." The universal association of fear and the book's jacket image from Psycho is a perfect starting point to this exploration of Hitchcock's "daring as he prompts us to challenge legal and moral propriety". And the book goes on to guess at "Hitchcock's ulterior aim", and suggests that, "by enticing us to look at death and to speculate about what follows it, he takes us into regions of experience we can only call spiritual".
Guns, Conrad notes, were too "vulgar and obvious" for Hitchcock to employ them as agents of death, and he seldom used them in his films, and then only by "sordid professionals like the assassins in Foreign Correspondent and The Man Who Knew Too Much". Hitchcock's killers, by contrast, are amateurs. Hitchcock's "gleeful perversity" might easily have sidelined him as a marginal or underground film-maker, Conrad believes, were it not for the director's determination not to follow the fate of his early British films, which played in what Hitchcock dismissively described as "little side-street cinemas".
When it came to tackling so many taboo themes at a time when rigid censorship regimes operated internationally, Conrad succinctly explains that Hitchcock surmounted this obstacle by astutely contriving "an ingeniously, speciously happy ending that was more disconcerting than the unhappy alternative". Conrad quotes from a 1936 interview in which Hitchcock declared: "I am out to give the public good, healthy, mental shake-ups", before going on to explain why we needed such therapy: "Civilisation has become so screening and sheltering that we cannot experience sufficient thrills at first hand. Therefore, to prevent our becoming sluggish or jellified, we have to experience them artificially, and the screen is the best medium for this."
This brilliant manipulator and gifted film-maker - who so directly drew our attention to our own voyeuristic nature in Rear Window, and who so meticulously thought out his films in advance that shooting them felt like an anti-climax - continues to grow in stature, 25 years after he made his last film, Family Plot.
Conrad's multi-layered appreciation and examination of Hitchcock and his work is such an erudite, thought-provoking and rewarding book that it encourages the always pleasurable pursuit of re-viewing Hitchcock's finest films, of which there are so many, in the light of the meanings and resonances unearthed in this rich, original reading of his work.
Michael Dwyer is Film Correspondent of The Irish Times