Resisting Arrest

This work is an innovative and entertaining exploration of the root of the pleasure we take in detective fiction in all media. How do we derive pleasure from reading about or watching a detective’s exploits - in a vicarious experience of genius? Or in witnessing the commission of a crime, an equally vicarious experience of violence? Resisting Arrest looks at the detective genre in its many different cultural manifestations, from popular fiction to high literature, from art films to popular television series, and finds that the genre is in fact constituted principally by the promises on which it fails to deliver.