Culture Never Recovered

From his rear window, M. Keith Booker reads the new anthology of stories inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Maxim Jakubowski.

By M. Keith BookerDecember 15, 2025

• Film

• Noir

EDITOR MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI has recently made something of a specialty of compiling collections of stories inspired by the work of his favorite writers, including Cornell Woolrich and J. G. Ballard. In his newest anthology, he has gathered 24 original (commissioned) stories inspired in one way or another by the life and work of Alfred Hitchcock. Such a collection is no surprise given the ongoing prominence in American film culture of Hitchcock’s work and of Hitchcock as an individual. Indeed, while it has now been a century since the release of the first feature film he directed and nearly half a century since his last, Hitchcock remains one of the most widely recognizable names (and silhouettes) in cinema history. In addition, the concept of the “Hitchcockian” is so well established that it provides a perfect starting point for such a themed collection.

It is little wonder, then, that Jakubowski has been able to assemble quite an impressive array of authors who are celebrated in various fields, especially crime and mystery fiction. The stories in the collection are excellent reads in their own right, though Hitchcock’s ongoing aura is such that the real fun resides in discovering exactly how each author has decided to carry out the “inspired by” charge they were given. In some cases, the connections are overt; in others, they require a bit of sleuthing to discern. The different authors have, in fact, undertaken the task in an impressive variety of ways, which gives the collection a surprising diversity while also adding a level of suspense beyond that involved in the plots themselves. Jakubowski has suggested that the anthology might be used for a parlor game in which participants try to guess the specific films that inspired the stories. In fact, one tale—Kim Newman’s hilariously titled “Hitchcock Presents” (you have to read it to know why the title is hilarious)—is even built around a guessing game involving clues to various Hitchcock films, making it a sort of microcosm of the collection itself.

The book gets off to a fast start with Peter Swanson’s “Strangers on a School Bus,” which reads most of the way through like Strangers on a Train (1951) transformed into a high school drama among rival teenage girls. The story, though, is not a spoof, and the premise is carried out with complete seriousness. Meanwhile, a late plot twist reveals a more complex connection to other Hitchcock films, with Psycho (1960) playing a particularly important role. Still another dimension is added by the fact that the central character has just taken a film class featuring several films by Hitchcock and might have been inspired by them. This adds a note of playfulness that would be quite at home in a Hitchcock film, or perhaps even more in an episode of his long-running TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–65).

Indeed, the stories in the collection (in part simply because of their brevity) tend to be more reminiscent of the tone and rhythm of the show’s episodes than of the director’s films, even when they contain obvious tie-ins to the latter. A good example is the short piece contributed by Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher thrillers. Entitled “The Birds on a Train,” the story plays with the expectations engendered by the book’s basic concept. Does it somehow combine Strangers on a Train with The Birds (1963)? If so, how is that going to work? Child then manages to hold those questions open until the obligatory twist ending that answers them in a sudden outburst of surprising violence—but a sardonically amusing violence that arises in a way that subverts what many readers would likely expect.

Most of the stories in this collection have contemporary settings, updating their Hitchcockian motifs to the present day. As a result, characters have access to technologies such as cellphones, which sometimes play important roles in the plots. For example, the narrator and central character of Guy Adams’s strange and hallucinatory “Psycho Geography” appears to be shooting a remake of Psycho with his phone, having broken into the Universal Studios lot so that he can use the Bates Motel set. To some extent, this story is about Psycho, on which its narrator delivers a running commentary throughout, including an exposition on the paradigm-shifting importance of the film in cinema history. “Cinema was changed by it,” he tells us. “Culture never recovered.” The narrator himself has apparently never recovered either, and the result is a very dark (but still oddly amusing) narrative that reads almost like Hitchcock as told by Jim Thompson.

One particularly direct use of a Hitchcock film, occurring quite late in the collection, is the story “Russian Hill” by Jerome Charyn, which recapitulates much of Vertigo (1958) almost exactly while still managing to add a few extra details. Charyn’s story is thus somewhat different from the others: instead of building suspense by making the reader wait to see when the Hitchcock connections will come into play, he pulls readers along by making them wonder when (and how) the plot will finally veer away from Hitchcock’s original. It eventually does, though with a “twist” ending that defeats the expectations built up by the collection.

Another particularly direct use of Vertigo occurs in Sophie Hannah’s “Danielle’s the Dead One.” Here, though, the central character—who might or might not be under suspicion for a murder that might or might not have occurred—is quite aware of the parallels to the film in her own experiences. She even insists that the police detective investigating the case watch Vertigo before she will agree to answer his questions, so that he can better understand her perspective. The fiftysomething detective enjoys the movie, though he has trouble grasping the significance of some very obvious parallels between its plot and the woman’s story. To add another twist, the detective is none other than Detective Constable Simon Waterhouse, imported from Hannah’s well-established Zailer and Waterhouse series of crime novels.

Similarly, while M. W. Craven’s “The Migratory Pattern of Birds” takes its inspiration from the 1972 film Frenzy (not from The Birds, as one might expect from the title), it adds a bit of intertextual fun by introducing this inspiration into the world of his popular Washington Poe crime series. Here, Detective Sergeant Washington Poe and his trusty sidekick, police data analyst Tilly Bradshaw, brilliantly discover the identity of a serial killer through a very Holmesian process of deduction—in a narrative set mostly at a posh dinner party that often reads like a warped comedy of manners. Craven also gets in a sly bit of self-promotion (a very Hitchcockian thing to do) by revealing, at the end, that Poe and Bradshaw are planning to start their own detective agency.

This story is one of many in the collection that—like Hitchcock’s films and the episodes of his TV series—contain a heavy dose of humor. One of the more interesting stories in this regard is Peter Lovesey’s “Killing Hitch,” a murder mystery of sorts that is almost entirely comic. In one of the more literal interpretations of the Hitchcockian, the story is actually presented as a script written for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Built around Hitchcock’s considerable international fame (and distinctive physical appearance), the whimsical tale effectively captures the flavor of the series—though it would have been an unusual episode given that Hitchcock himself is the central character, serving as both detective and (sort of) murder victim.

“Hitchcock Blondes Have More Fun” by Lily Samson (the pen name of metafictional novelist Sam Mills) also features Hitchcock as a character. Indeed, its very Hitchcockian narrative is deeply embedded in the world of film, giving us a virtual inventory of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, and especially of his famed cameo appearances in each of his movies. This scenario makes sense, given that Samson (a.k.a. Mills) has frequently been described as “obsessed” with Hitchcock. The same goes for the story’s main character, who starts out as an extra in Hitchcock’s early British films, then follows the director to Hollywood, eventually taking her obsession to, well, extremes.

Speaking of extreme, one of the most imaginative uses of Hitchcock’s films occurs in the story “The Nest” by Jeff Noon, a writer who first made his name in science fiction but who has also written crime and fantasy novels. This particular story is a sort of alternate-world fantasy that bleeds into horror, recapitulating Hitchcock’s most famous films in a unique way while going places Hitchcock never did, but in a manner that clearly qualifies as Hitchcockian. Other stories also go to extremes never quite found in Hitchcock’s work, such as Vaseem Khan’s “The Hunter” and S. A. Cosby’s “Split Your Silver Tongue.” A bit more graphically violent than the typical Hitchcock movie (Psycho perhaps excepted), these two examples still build suspense in a very Hitchcockian way before their surprise conclusions.

Several of the writers in the collection boast extensive credentials as film critics in addition to their work as fiction writers: for example, Anne Billson, longtime film reviewer for The Sunday Telegraph as well as a horror novelist, contributes a dark but clever story that seems designed to work in as many oblique allusions to Hitchcock’s films as possible. It features a woman artist whose paintings seem mostly to have been derived from murders in Hitchcock movies—except that all the victims are now men. One exception is a painting that just might be of Carlotta Valdes (from Vertigo).

David Thomson, a film critic who has published an entire book on Psycho, has also written several novels, such as Suspects (1985), that feature characters cleverly lifted from well-known films. Here, he contributes a story about an actor who is performing in a Hitchcockian film about a multiple murderer—the same real-world murderer who inspired John Banville’s award-winning 1989 novel The Book of Evidence. The protagonist even encounters this murderer, now out of prison, in a scene in which Hitchcock himself makes a typical cameo appearance. Speaking of these famous cameos, Donna Moore’s story—actually titled “Cameo”—is built around a clever twist on the concept. Assembled from a wide range of references to Hitchcock films and twisted versions of the director’s personal legend, it ends with a bang.

Whatever the form taken by the encounter with Hitchcock in these stories, it seems safe to describe them all as tributes rather than critical engagements—which is only to be expected given that the authors were largely recruited because of their known admiration for the filmmaker’s work. The anthology is clearly aimed at readers who are also Hitchcock fans, and at least some familiarity with the director’s work will certainly enhance the experience of reading them. Most of the stories, however, capture the essence of the Hitchcockian well enough to be quite successful works of suspense in their own right, even without the added charge of allusion. One could perhaps analyze the stories as examples of postmodern pastiche, and such an analysis might even be useful in demonstrating the many forms such pastiche can take, but they are, ultimately, works of entertainment. Written mostly by master practitioners of the mystery/suspense genre, they certainly go well beyond mere fan fiction, though they do include a significant amount of fan service. Indeed, Hitchcock fans are well served by their efforts.