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At a public lecture a few years ago, a Lacanian psychoanalyst declared that the only way Lacan's theory would gain widespread popularity in this country was if someone made a TV series about a detective who was a Lacanian psychoanalyst. The premise with which Bond opens Lacan at the Scene is very similar: ‘What if Jacques Lacan - the brilliant and eccentric Parisian psychoanalyst - had left his home in the early 1950s in order to travel to England and work as a police detective? How might he have applied his theories in order to solve crime?'’ (p. 1).
Another recent book - Bruce Fink's (2010) anagrammatically titled The Psychoanalytic Adventures of Inspector Canal - is testament to the fact that other Lacanians have asked themselves the same question. After all, Lacan himself chose to open his Ecrits not with a dense theoretical treatise of the kind for which he is known but, rather, with a commentary on a detective novella: Poe's The Purloined Letter.
This does not mean in any sense that Bond's book is unoriginal: quite the opposite. Many readers will find its practical application of Lacan's theory refreshing, given the paucity of published clinical material in the Lacanian literature. But Lacan at the Scene cannot be taken in the light-hearted way that some previous Lacanian readings of other ‘texts’ (films, literature) can. Indeed, given the book's disturbing content - reproductions of crime-scene photographs of murders committed in England between 1955 and 1970 - and the difficulties Bond reports in conducting his research in the National Archives at Kew, it is impressive that this book even made it into print. Bond is careful, however, to be sensitive to his subject matter and to avoid any hint of the callous voyeurism or noir pastiche that is a familiar cliché of the detective fiction genre.