Call it the Marley Industrial Complex: an unrelenting stream of companies and commodities branded by a certain late, great Jamaican reggae singer. Aside from the spate of albums, box sets and commemorative editions, there’s the official clothing line, candles, sundry home furnishings and Marley Coffee Inc. There are documentaries and tribute shows, a museum in Jamaica and a resort in the Bahamas (I once stayed there, in the Kinky Reggae room, relishing Get Up, Stand Up cocktails at the Stir It Up bar). There are books upon books: about Marley’s life, his early life, the making of his albums; coffee-table volumes; photo essays; highbrow academic texts; tell-alls by those close to him (mother, wife, son, manager). There’s been so much Marley-related ink spilled that “Bob Marley: The Complete Annotated Bibliography” codifies more than 400 editions of the books.

All of which makes the subtitle of Chris Salewicz’s new Marley biography — “The Untold Story” — utterly comedic. What could Salewicz, a British music journalist who once interviewed Marley, have to say about this icon that hasn’t been said before? Dowe really need another Bob bio?

The answer, in short, is no. But that doesn’t render Salewicz’s indefatigably thorough book entirely beside the point. To those inquiring minds — and they exist by the legion — who want to know what Marley ate for breakfast the day he married Rita Anderson (curried goat, rice, green bananas), or what name the Maoris in New Zealand bestowed on the beloved singer (“the Redeemer”), Salewicz’s book should be quite welcome; every detail is, to the Marley fan, a treasure-trove.

One can also make the case that a tale as rich as Marley’s never tires of the telling. After all, rarely does one man’s narrative so seamlessly collide with grander ones: the story of Jamaican music and Jamaican politics and postcolonial life in general. “Bob Marley” covers this ground, fluently moving between the public and the private. The singer was born Nesta Robert Marley on Feb. 6, 1945, to Cedella Malcolm and Capt. Norval Marley, a so-called white Jamaican who by all accounts was neither white (he was most likely of mixed racial background) nor a captain (he was a professional ne’er-do-well who, after naming his son, played a minimal role in his life). Cedella and Bob eventually relocated from “the rolling, feminine countryside” of St. Ann to Kingston, settling in Trench Town, a 1950s development — concrete units constructed around a courtyard with communal cooking facilities. There the young Marley encountered forces that shaped his life: Rastafarianism, sound systems (which Salewicz says were like “portable discos for giants”) and two fellow musicians, Bunny Living­ston and Peter Tosh, with whom he would form the Wailers.

In 1962, Jamaica attained independence, Trench Town got a sewage system and the 16-year-old Marley released his first couple of singles: non-charting ska songs for which he was paid five pounds. It was an inauspicious start to a career that proved anything but. Salewicz, who has also written a biography of Joe Strummer, follows Marley from his work with the Jamaican music producers Coxsone Dodd and Lee Perry, to his signing with the Island Records mogul Chris Blackwell and the eventual recording of “Exodus” in 1977 (named the best album of the century by Time magazine), to his starring role in “one of the key civilizing moments of the 20th century”: Jamaica’s One Love Peace Concert in 1978, during which Marley held up the hands of the vicious political rivals Edward Seaga and Michael Manley in a gesture of unity. Marley’s life indeed makes “Legend” an apt title for his most popular greatest-hits collection.

Salewicz’s prose, which veers toward flatness and cliché (“Like Barack Obama, Bob Marley is a mixed-race archetype”), can also be excruciatingly essentialist. “The very air of Jamaica seems thick with great truths and inconceivable, magical mysteries,” he writes, later calling Rastafarians “primal figures” who “could appear as archetypal and prophetic as a West African baobab tree.” He does, however, give us quotations from a full range of sources, every portentous dream had by Marley’s loved ones and gossipy bits galore: Rita gave birth to a child who may not have been Bob’s; the mob boss Paul Castellano was about to underwrite Marley’s expansion into the American market when the singer died.

With all these details, though, Salewicz doesn’t get us any closer to unraveling the two greatest mysteries of Marley’s life. First, who was behind the attack on his life in 1976, when a barrage of bullets was fired on his Kingston home? One of the two Jamaican political parties’ gang enforcers? A collector for a local gambling debt? Or, as many believe — and, Salewicz says, as Prime Minister Manley alleged — the C.I.A., anxious about Marley’s influence? Second, what were the circumstances behind his death in 1981? He underwent an operation for melanoma on his toe in 1977; three years later, he collapsed in Central Park and was told he had a terminal brain tumor. Who in his inner circle knew of his condition and might have encouraged him to remain vigilant? What sort of injections was he given during his last days at a clinic run by a former member of the SS?

Four hundred pages into this biography, I ultimately found myself staring at the singer’s photo on the cover and wondering who Bob Marley truly was. Neither minutiae nor set lists nor copies of expense reports — nor Salewicz’s pat claims about Marley’s mixed-race identity leaving him “alienated and ostracized” as a boy, nor Rita Marley’s assertion that “Bob had a lot of hurt” — ultimately provide a portrait of the artist as a human being. But that, in the end, has its benefits: it keeps Marley ever elusive, allowing for one more book, one more film, one more story that’s never been told.