Reviewed by: Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture Martina Kolb (bio) Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture. By Robert A. Rushing. New York: Other Press, 2007. xxiii + 191 pp. $29.00. “Readers . . . believe they are vicariously enjoying the genius of Sherlock Holmes, but are actually enjoying the idiocy of Watson” (9), writes Rushing in a symptomatically polemical overture to his remarkable study of the libidinal logic that has driven our reading of mysteries. Albeit of eclectic and uneven Anglo-American, Italian, and Swedish orientation, Resisting Arrest is of decisive comparative scope, performing readings of detective fiction, art film, and TV serial alike. Being considerably more than yet another history of the genre’s seemingly exhausted claims, Rushing’s passionate contribution expands the psychoanalytic perspective into a cultural reassessment of detection’s (extra)canonical, (anti)authoritarian potential. [End Page 545] Addressing Rushing’s “attention not only to the sleuth’s desire but our own,” Samir Dayal stresses this book’s innovative take on the “extradiegetic terrain” (“Foreword,” viii). And indeed—and in contradistinction to his critical partners in crime (primarily Slavoj Žižek, whom he lauds as “culturally promiscuous” [13])—Rushing focuses his analyses on detection’s “exculpating” its readers (53). Initially reaffirming the traditional psychoanalytic dynamics of retrospection and reconstruction—Freud, Lacan, Žižek, and Joan Copjec—Rushing subsequently zooms in on “enjoyment” (159), which he deals with almost as a genre in its own right, and which is the device for his disclosure of detection’s less apparent associations with psychoanalysis. While pursuing return and repetition, he acknowledges “a long-standing, and . . . mutually beneficial relationship between psychoanalysis and detective fiction” (94). He makes mention of the importance of Holmes for Freud, Poe for Lacan, and Hitchcock for Žižek, but then re-orients this time-honored psychoanalytic framework, mobilizing his title into a major argument: desire is never arrested, in that its object remains as unreachable as the reader’s satisfaction. In “I: Introduction,” the binary of the “classic” versus the “hard-boiled” generic variants are overcome, while a third road into further subgenres is pursued. Presenting fine insights into various modes of literary and cultural classification, Rushing deconstructs John Irwin’s elitist claim that high art, unlike detection, encourages re-reading, persuasively evidencing our re-reading of high tragedies in spite of (or because of) our familiarity with their outcome (one might add that Kafka, according to Camus, likewise leads his readers into the temptation of such re-reading). It is true that serial reading has been associated with popular writing, but what, asks Rushing astutely, is the difference anyway between re-reading serious and re-reading unserious works? It is here that he launches his intriguing response: perverse pleasure in pain emerges when we keep returning to what refuses to give us satisfaction. Desire, then, is kept alive by a psycho-narrative structure grounded in the dynamics of “enjoyment.” Addressing works by Laura Levine, Henning Mankell, and Andrea Camilleri, “II: Irritation” confronts Swedish icebergs with Sicilian wastelands, stressing provincial over metropolitan settings. With poetological brilliance, Rushing imagines narrative irritation as a kernel of sand, which makes the pearl by deferring its completion. He classifies “classical detective fiction” as “Catholic in its insistence on the purity of intention,” while the “Protestant” hard-boiled variation “admits the sinful desire, but only counts our . . . works for or against us” (29). “III: Desire” is about how Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Christie’s Orient Express manage to continuously keep desire alive. Interpreting the latter as a “frustrated travel narrative” (59), [End Page 546] Rushing focuses on metaphors of travel versus domestic arrest (via marriage), and on tourism as domesticated travel without adventure: “Arrest . . . rest . . . stasis . . . domesticity . . . end of travel” (49). “IV: Anxiety” studies Antonioni’s L’avventura and Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley —films which ask for the viewer’s courage in confronting the “real of desire” (7). “There is no arrest” (67), in that Anna’s absent presence haunts a story whose mystery reminds Rushing of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Vertigo, and Psycho. It is unfortunate, however, that he seems unconcerned about the fact that in L’avventura— and in stark contrast to Hitchcock— nothing marks the few...