Alfred Hitchcock: A Life In Darkness and Light may be the best biography of a film director ever written. Long and detailed, filled with fascinating information about all aspects of Hitchcock's life and films, it's also a great read, almost as entertaining as a Hitchcock film.
There have been two previous full-scale biographies of the director. Hitch, by John Russell Taylor, was published in Hitchcock's lifetime and with his cooperation -- it sets forth the basic facts without delving too deeply into problematic areas. Donald Spoto's well-known The Dark Side Of Genius, published a couple of years after the director's death, was more detailed and uninhibited but, as its title suggests, had a somewhat slanted point of view. It marshaled evidence and highlighted it in such a way as to expose primarily the neurotic and malicious side of the man.
Patrick McGilligan, as his title suggests, tries for a more balanced view, and specifically challenges many of Spoto's interpretations of events and sources, while treading fearlessly into territory that Taylor avoided.
None of the books solves the mystery of Hitchcock's genius and art, because genius and art are mysteries without solutions, but in McGilligan one finds a plausible Hitchcock, one that contains all the complexity and contradiction of the films themselves, the darkness and the light.
It's a terrific achievement.
[Apologies for the web log's disappearance for a couple of days -- it exceeded its allotted bandwidth . . . too many visitors! I think the problem has been solved, and thanks for the interest!]