The role of probation and rehabilitation in Ruth Dugdall’s crime novels

This critical commentary accompanies my Cate Austin series of four novels (2010-) and argues they makes an original intervention within the genre of crime fiction through a new sub-genre of domestic noir that I designate probation noir. This sub-genre centres on a probation officer as the protagonist and authorial narrator, effectively shifting the definition of crime fiction as a broad and encompassing genre that usually focuses on the activity between a crime committed, the solving of it and subsequent capturing of the criminal, to a new reading of crime that highlights and challenges commonly held misconceptions about the treatment of criminals in modern Britain. Currently, in British crime fiction the probation officer rarely features as a protagonist or narrator, even though the probation service is integral to the criminal justice system. The Cate Austin series as probation noir, reveals the reality of rehabilitative work delivered by the probation service, and its importance in ensuring a safe society. As a writer, I argue that my probation noir novels also calls upon method writing as a creative practice, sharing features of Stanislavski’s method in relation to actors, to allow the creation of emotion-memory in crime fiction. This approach develops an emotionally affective foregrounding of rehabilitation and desistance in crime fiction, offering readers a new perspective on crime, criminals and rehabilitation that goes beyond the apprehending of the criminal and the solving of a crime. Furthermore, I show how probation noir with its focus on a desire to initiate a more nuanced understanding of criminality and the criminal justice system, has been seen to affect international social policy, and offer new impactful ways of reading of crime fiction. In this way, the Cate Austin series as an example of probation noir is an important and new contribution to the crime fiction genre.