The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White review – looking for Mr Fright

This innovative biography of the director - a wily tormentor of audiences and colleagues - is most successful when tracking his contemporary influence

Dickens never recovered from the spooky stories his nurse told him at bedtime, and few of us ever outgrow Hitchcock. He holds us captive by tweaking our anxieties and using cinematic techniques - warped angles of vision, painfully elongated time, nerve-shredding sonic shocks - to delectably torment us. Martin Scorsese has admitted that he screens Hitchcock's films repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly". Such repetitions always deliver revelations: watching the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much again the other day, I noticed that the anonymous London bobbies caught in a shootout are granted a line or two of jaunty dialogue just before they're killed. Their banter is enough to make them pitiably tragic, and it earns the aloof, unmerciful director some credit for compassion.

I dictate the picture," Hitchcock once said. To consolidate his power, he created a personal myth that became a lucrative commercial brand. When asked for an autograph, he often scribbled a silhouette: a blobby head with wispy hair, its plump curves interrupted by a concave nose and two puckered lips. Hitchcock made an icon of himself using nine economical pencil strokes; Edward White's study of his variegated legacies" disassembles him into 12 separate facets, each exposing an aspect of the public entity he crafted".