Publisher's Weekly
During the 1925 filming of Alfred Hitchcock's first movie, The Pleasure Garden, in Munich, the script girl and a musician are murdered. Clues and suspects are scarce, and the crimes go unsolved. Eleven years later in London, an old Munich acquaintance, ill and distraught, begs Hitchcock to read a spy thriller script. The script-deliverer is murdered on Hitchcock's doorstep. The script itself features the abduction of Alma Hitchcock and police pursuit of Hitch (as a suspected murderer), while he searches for a master spy in order to clear himself and rescue his wife. Alma is kidnapped, Hitch is almost framed for murder and he hares off, chased by Scotland Yard, in pursuit of a double-agent. Hitch and Alma are antiseptically nice but there are many other colorful, Hitchcockian characters (including the obligatory cool blonde), lots of dashing around (ending at a Channel-side mansion with 39 steps), much evidence of ''the Hitchcock touch'' and, of course, a MacGuffin, Hitchcock's famous red-herring device. The complications are far-fetched but entertaining, and the brisk pace is worthy of Hitch himself. Baxt also wrote The Dorothy Parker Murder Case.