Stories are hugely important to our understanding and experience of crime, justice, and social harm. We may like to think of criminology as a science where the causes, our experiences and responses to crime can be measured with accuracy. There is a place for such statistical analyses; but criminology is also interested in things that cannot be measured, including the stories we tell and the narratives we construct to explain our experiences. Stories have had an important place in the history and development of criminology, from Clifford Shaw's (1930) The Jack-Roller through to contemporary growth in narrative criminology (e.g. Presser and Sandberg, 2015). In this new book Rafe McGregor draws on this rich heritage to take narrative criminology in a new direction by constructing a criminology of narrative fiction. Rafe highlights how narratives have been important for criminological data collection and analysis and for providing a framework of understanding, but attention has tended to be on narratives derived from real-world experiences. In this book the focus is fiction – particularly narratives in crime fiction in cinema but also in novels, television series, and graphic novels. It is argued that fictional narratives not only provide criminologists with useful material to aid teaching and learning, but are also sources of real and meaningful data. According to Rafe, these can be phenomenological by representing experiences, counterfactual by representing possible situations that do not exist, or mimetic by accurately representing reality.

The aim of the New Horizons in Criminology series is to provide high quality and authoritative texts which reflect cutting edge thought and theoretical development in criminology, have an international scope and are also accessible and concise. This new book fits this description well in arguing for fiction to be taken seriously. Rafe takes the reader with him as he unpacks a theory of the criminological value of fiction. Ideas are explained clearly and illustrated by detailed examples from a range of international settings. The examples also represent an array of cinematic (and other) traditions, from box office crowd pleasers such as Beverly Hills Cop (1984), through to popular TV such as The Wire (2002–8) or Broadchurch (2013–17), or graphic novels such as The Sheriff of Baghdad (2018). Rafe is also able to draw on his own experiences including as a former South African police officer.