There are a million stories in the naked city, unfortunately most of them arrive fully clothed on the rare occasions they make it onto the cinema screen, so their nakedness won't offend our delicate sensibilities. Criminals, for the most part, are ugly animalistic thugs who commit crimes for the most selfish reasons. Their supposed "charisma" would be considerably lessened if they didn't have a gun in their hand. Of course, you really wouldn't want to spend any time with these dopes so Hollywood dresses them up into more complicated, more photogenic anti-heroes. Decharne ploughs through dozens of tattered pulp novels to trace classic flicks including Get Carter, LA Confidential, Point Blank, Psycho, etc back to their gritty source. Full of "unauthorised cash withdrawals" and people dying of "lead poisoning", this tome thankfully eschews the pompous subtext and strained metaphors of most film books, leaving what any good detective wants: just the facts, ma'am.

A lively exploration of the origins of some of Hollywood's most vivid plots – not only the reworked novels and screenplays, but real events. Police reports, Mafiosi and serial killers are never far away. Décharné renders an intriguing picture of the powerful place this art form has come to occupy in society, and why.

Every now and then you stumble upon a book that's just so full of stuff – real nuggets, pearls of wisdom or just plain daft facts – that you can't get enough of it. You dip into it, any page, in any order and you know there's going to be something there that has you shaking your head in slightly baffled wonderment. Schott's Original Miscellany would be such a book, as is The Oxford Dictionary Of Slang or Fast Food Nation. Hardboiled Hollywood is another absolute winner, too.

To get the most out of Max Décharné's minutely detailed low-life lowdown, it's best to have an abiding obsession with the seamy traditions of film noir, pulp fiction, gangsters, psychos, hitmen, robbers, cops, molls, pimps, johns and stooges. If you love Little Caesar and L.A. Confidential, still watch Psycho with your fingernails dug deep into the sofa and have more than once wished it was you robbing the banks and hitting the highways with Faye Dunaway instead of that square jawed buffoon Warren Beatty, then Hardboiled Hollywood is for you. Quite simply, it tells you stuff you never would have known – amazing stuff, too.

In essence, Hardboiled Hollywood's mission statement is to take a handful of cinema classics – The Big Sleep, Point Blank, Bonnie And Clyde among them – and examine how each movie's originators drew upon their source material. More often than not the inspiration for the movies came from a hard-hitting pulp novel which, in turn, had been coloured by real-life events. Yet the finished movies – pictures we perceive today as being masters of their form – were typically the product of the Hollywood blend, with much of the grit of the penny paperbacks cut back, watered down or plain removed to appease studio chiefs and censors alike.

Hardboiled Hollywood takes us deep into a demi-monde of wiseguys and bad cops and, frankly, common or garden nutters. Perhaps the most sickeningly compelling of Décharné e's portraits comes in his account of Ed Gein. A quiet, gentle Wisconsin farmer, after the death of his mother in 1949 Gein lived all alone. At night he used to pleasure himself by digging up cadavers and dancing under the moonlight with his new friends. A keen hunter, he quickly graduated to mounting their heads on his wall, keeping them in his rambling farm's many outhouses. He spent his spare time skinning them, wearing the intact epidermis of a female limb as a stocking or amusing himself by donning a brand new face mask. It was only a matter of time before he began targeting the bodies of those still living and breathing. Gein bumped them off and eventually got caught.

Ed Gein's activities came to the attention of a local crime-thriller writer, Robert Bloch. Bloch, too, lived in rural Wisconsin and had been following the bizarre case on local radio after Gein's arrest in 1957. He recognised potential thriller currency straight away but, well aware that no publisher would dare print a novel alluding to Gein's penchant for taxidermy, Bloch drew upon the basics of the case and sat down to write Psycho.

"I came up with his being a motel keeper because of easy access to strangers," says Bloch in Hardboiled Hollywood. "I thought, what if he committed these crimes in an amnesiac fugue, with another personality taking over?"

Ed Gein, under constant police interrogation, never deviated from the assertion that, while he accepted that it must have been him who did these things, he could not remember a single thing about any of it. Gein was a classic, middle-aged misfit, replicated by the bald, overweight Norman Bates that Block created in his novel, published in 1959. It was well-received and a rave review in The New York Times caught the eye of one Alfred Hitchcock. A notorious miser, Hitchcock could have afforded to pay the middling pulp author top dollar. Instead though, having first ascertained that most studios' readers had passed on the novel because of its graphic content, Hitchcock instructed his secretary to put in an anonymous bid. Knowing there had been no other serious interest, he drove the price down to a universal buy-out of $9,000. That means the author sold his entire interest in the book and its characters, never to see another penny. In the words of his pal Harlan Ellison, "He got screwed, royally".

Had Bloch stayed involved, he might have been bemused to see his tubby, repellent, middle-aged loser brought to life by teen idol Anthony Perkins. On one key element, however, Hitchcock remained unerringly true to Bloch's original vision: "I had a notion that a person is never more defenceless than when taking a shower..."

Indeed. Hardboiled Hollywood gives us insights, anecdotes and minutiae of this sort on every single page, humanising iconic actors, directors and writers and , in exposing their vanities and absurdities, making them even more divine. Décharné gives us a wondrous autopsy of Howard Hawks' hardboiled epic The Big Sleep, starring Bogie and Lauren Bacall and based upon the Raymond Chandler novel. Yet for all the nutritious details of how the film was bedevilled by the on-off Bogart-Bacall affair, for all the loving reminiscences of alcoholic former Bogart wives invading the set, all the tales of Bacall demanding her sexy screen sister Martha Vickers should be cut out of the final picture and all the stories of Bogart's nervous breakdown almost rendering him incapable of completing the movie, it's the marvellous anecdotes of professional jealousy that really raise the roof with this chapter. Chandler knew he was good. Even when he was getting paid $180 a contribution to pulp mags like Black Mask, he knew he could stand comparison with greats like Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man) and James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice). Yet, when the first reviews of The Big Sleep finally elevated Chandler to the big league, giving a complimentary nod in the direction of those two authors, he said: "Hammett, okay, but James Cain? Faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billy-goat. He is the kind of writer I detest. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things but because they do it in a dirty way."

Ouch! Writers are amongst the most insecure critters under God's great canopy, and the envious doggerel they spew about one another is always priceless stuff – especially in the context of the mutual toadying that inevitably accompanies a meeting in the flesh. Just over a year after his savaging of Cain, Chandler was enjoying the fruits of widespread acclaim and no doubt seeing the world through rosier (and much more expensive) specs, when he received a signed copy of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity. He wrote to thank his new writer mate:

"Dear Jim, it was very kind of you to send me an inscribed copy of the book and I'm very grateful to you..."

Hardboiled Hollywood is, truly, a treasure trove. Describing what drove him to write L.A. Confidential, James Ellroy could just as well be recommending this brilliant, hip compendium: "You're looking at a cast of usually very good-looking actors and all I want to know is who's a homosexual, who's a nymphomaniac, who's a sader, who's got the biggest wang, who's got the smallest, who's impotent, who's the sword-swallower, who's the peeper, who's the prowler, who's the pimp, who's the pederast, who's the panty-sniffer."

Get Hardboiled Hollywood. It'll tell you.

Max Décharné's Hardboiled Hollywood is just as much about the books that inspired the movies as it is a well-researched exploration of the films themselves. Working chronologically from 'Little Caesar' to 'LA Cconfidential', Décharné shines the spotlight on ten classic movies, dropping them into a historical perspective and exploring the stories that inspired them. Anyone with an interest in hardboiled fiction needs this book on his shelf.

Décharné quotes Raymond Chandler: 'The average critic never recognises an achievement when it happens. He explains it after it has become respectable.' Interesting, then, that a certain London listings magazine dismissed the film of 'The Godfather' with a three-word review: 'Leaden mafia caper', then complained in 1978 that the follow-up wasn't nearly as good. We all learn by our mistakes.

Like a good anthology, Hardboiled Hollywood probably offers a fair bit of anecdotal novelty for even hardboiled fans. This critic was previously ignorant of Dorothy B Hughes's gruelling-sounding 1947 serial killer novel, In A Lonely Place, which was to give Bogart one of his most complex roles, and Val Guest's 1960 film Hell Is A City, which made Hammer the company behind one of the few creditable British contributions to film noir.