Boileau came up with their strange and sinister plots, while Narcejac’s characterisation made the central character’s relentless nightmare seem all too real. Vertigo, to use its current title, is a perfect example of the form from this crime-writing duo who wrote together over four decades. Like Patricia Highsmith, who had recently published Strangers on a Train (also filmed by Hitchcock) and her story of obsession The Price of Salt (also published as Carol), Boileau-Narcejac rejected both the English whodunnit and the American hardboiled styles in favour of psychological thrillers.

What Hitchcock didn’t know was that Boileau-Narcejac (as the duo styled themselves) had actually written the novel with the director in mind. The director had missed out on their 1952 debut collaboration She Who Was No More, so he was determined to secure the rights to The Living and the Dead. The 1954 novel by the French writing duo Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac was originally called The Living and the Dead in its 1956 English translation, but Hitchcock’s snappier title appears to have taken over for later editions. The story will be familiar to fans of the film starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, though Hitchcock transposed the book’s action from Paris and Marseilles to San Francisco. Hopefully, the original novel will now enjoy a similar revival as it is reissued by a new crime and mystery imprint from Pushkin Press, which has named the new series Pushkin Vertigo after the first book to appear in it. Following a critical reevaluation, it replaced Citizen Kane as the best film of all time in the 2012 British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound critics’ poll. Hitchcock’s psychological thriller is now recognised as one of the best films of the 20th century, although it had mixed reviews at the time and only received two Oscar nominations in technical categories. While an Alfred Hitchcock adaptation was always a coup for any author, ultimately the master’s movie tended to overshadow the book – and that is certainly the case with Vertigo (1958).

Vertigo boileau narcejac