The British word for blurb is puff, a more precise term for those back-of-the-book exhortations to buy. In the case of Lynn Haney’s “Gregory Peck: A Charmed Life” (Avalon, 475 pages, $26), the puffer assures us that the biographer “leaves no stone unturned.” Of course, as the Reverend Chasuble would observe, the expression is metaphorical. No biographer can turn over all the stones. And though Ms. Haney claims to have interviewed 200 people and consulted many archives, she provides no source notes and does not even supply a list of those interviewed.

As a breezy once-over of Peck’s career, this biography is not bad – if you can get over the cliche-a-paragraph clip of Ms. Haney’s prose. She favors expressions like “at this point in time” and characterizes Peck – whose “name blazed across the marquees of theaters from sea to shining sea” – as handling gossip columnists with “kid gloves.”

Wading through the dead metaphors is reminiscent of watching a hackneyed film on television when you are tired and are too bored to change the channel. It goes down smoothly enough as a soporific. And though Ms. Haney’s book may have more facts per page than earlier Peck biographies, I found the work of Gary Fishgall and Michael Freedland better written and more insightful.

Peck is one of her main sources, but to what extent he really wanted her to do the biography is open to doubt. When she questioned him about his first marriage, he replied: “Comes a time when a man just has to get married.” I have no doubt Peck said this, but why does Ms. Haney repeat it? She praises him for his “easy generosity.” Too easy, I’d say; he obliges by disclosing nothing.

What I’m getting at is that it looks like Ms. Haney talked to lots of people but interviewed no one. So I’ll turn over one stone – a pebble really – to make my point about the biographer’s business.

“The Million Pound Note” (1954,also titled “Man with a Million”) is one of Peck’s better roles (although Ms. Haney seems not to care, since she prefers to chatter about everything except Peck’s performances).In researching the life of the director, screenwriter, and political activist Jill Craigie, I once asked her friend, the director Ronald Neame, who worked with her on the screenplay of “The Million Pound Note,” what Peck thought of her.

In 1954, Gregory Peck’s popularity was peaking, and Mr. Neame and Craigie were delighted to snag him for a relatively modest British production. But Mr. Neame doubted if Greg would remember Jill. There were only a few script conferences because the actor seemed quite content with her work.

Of Peck, on the other hand, Lauren Bacall once said that he was the “most gorgeous creature I’d ever seen in my life.” That is how Craigie reacted, and she did not especially like actors. She had a writer’s wariness of them. Her husband, Michael Foot, was a big fan of Claude Raines, but Jill told him that Raines was, like many actors, an egomaniac – as a dismayed Foot discovered for himself during his one encounter with the conceited Claude.

Was Peck another Narcissus? I had to find out in spite of Neame’s discouraging response. I had no address for the actor, but found one on a Web site a fan had set up. Is this any way for a professional biographer to behave? Well, reader, I sent a letter off to Peck, suspecting that it would not get to him, or that if it did, that he would not reply.

What nagged at me, however, was what Jill’s daughter and her friends said – how Jill had dolled herself up everyday she went to the movie set and how smitten she was with Peck. Did Jill’s crush – and she was a beautiful woman – have no impact on Peck? In my letter to Peck, I decided not to say much about Jill or my biography, to see if he had any independent memory of her.

To my delight, he replied:

I regret that my only recollection of Jill Craigie is of a good-looking young woman who occasionally visited the set.

Not much else, except that she had an engaging smile. Was she cheering us on as the writer of the piece, or was it a bit flirtatious? I never found out.

This kind of response makes a biographer’s day. It is not a big discovery, of course, but it ratified what I had heard from the Craigie contingent. It also told me something rather nice about Gregory Peck, who was then just a year or so away from dying.

This long digression from the book under review is my way of saying that what Ms. Haney lacks is persistence. She makes lots of contacts but gives up quite easily. When she asks Peck about a romance with Ingrid Bergman during the making of “Spellbound,” he answers: “I don’t talk about things like that.” And that is the only prize the biographer wins – the opportunity to quote Peck saying, again, nothing.

If Peck tolerated Ms. Haney, I suspect it is because he understood that she would not press him. I’m not saying that she could have coerced Peck into confession, but biographers have their ways, which Ms. Haney evidently has never heard of.