David Simon is probably best known for his amazing HBO series, The Wire. The Wire is the only piece of television I’ve seen that can approach, and surpass, the impact of a full-length novel. If you haven’t seen it, you’ll think I’m crazy when I say that I think it is the War and Peace of our time. If you have seen it, you’ll agree. It’s that good.
One of the reasons for the brilliance of The Wire is the agglomeration of detail throughout the five series1. There is a small incident in the first season that plays out in the fifth (the last). There are tiny scenes that in themselves are apparently unconnected to the narrative around them, but which add resonance to events much later in a season, never mind an episode. Simon plays a long and detailed game, and this book, first published in the US in 1991, was the start.
It is the record of a year that Simon, at the time a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, spent with the homicide detectives of the Baltimore Police Department. It is remarkable for the portrait it paints of the detectives in the squad and, to a lesser extent, their supervisors. Unlike The Wire though, it does not deal directly with more senior policemen.
There are close to 300 homicides per year in Baltimore, and their investigation is shared between three shifts of detectives. Simon followed the shift commanded by Lieutenant Gary D’Addario. Of the 300 homicides per year, a large number are what the police call ‘dunkers’ – cases that are easily solved and processed through the system. A solved case, in the department’s argot, is ‘down’ or ‘in the black’, so called because they are recorded on a large board in the homicide office in black ink. Open cases are notated, appropriately enough, in red. Cases that aren’t ‘dunkers’ are ‘whodunnits’. A genuine investigation is needed and, in Baltimore, a little luck too.
Forensic evidence is rarely the thing that breaks the case. That still takes old-fashioned things like interrogations and witnesses. At the time of writing, DNA evidence was a relatively new phenomenon and lab processing times were impossibly long. But even more conventional trace evidence can only really be used to buttress an existing case made by the police themselves.
The highlight of the book for me is the way that Simon, clearly at least partly in love with the men he is writing about, paints an endearing picture of people who are certainly not above reproach, but who do a vital job extremely well. The language is fiercely filthy and occasionally takes on a baroque character, as it does in this exchange after one of D’Addario’s men has broken the hallowed chain of command:
“First of all, I take it you are of the Roman Catholic faith.”
“And proud of it.”
“Fine. Then let me ask: Do you accept me as your true and only begotten lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And thou shall have no other lieutenants before me?”
“No, sir”
“And that thou shalt forever keep this covenant and worship no false lieutenants?”
“No, sir.”
“Very good, sergeant,” says D’Addario, extending his right hand. “You may kiss the ring.”
Anyone who has seen The Wire will recognise this as characteristic of Simon’s pen, and there are numerous other incidents that make their way almost verbatim into the later series.
There is a wonderful humour at play too, as in this passage, in which a ‘red ball’ (i.e. politically charged) case has meant that the back streets of Baltimore are crawling with recruits looking for the tiniest piece of evidence:
One enterprising recruit produces, from the rear yard of 704 Newington, a clear palstic bag half filled with a dull yellow liquid.
“Sir,” he asks, holding the bag up to eye level, “is this important?”
“That appears to be a bag of piss,” says Garvey. “You can put it down anytime you like.”
What you get here is an in depth look at what it is like to be ‘a police’ in the city of Baltimore. There are some stunning statistics, and none more so than that a murder has only a 40% chance of being solved and successfully prosecuted. There are some amazing cases, like that of a lady who has arranged for the murder of several men and picked up the insurance payout on each of them. And there is the Latonya Wallace case, a straight red-ball shit storm, which snakes its way through the book and consumes the life of its lead detective, Tom Pellegrini.
Homicide is essential reading, not only for admirers of The Wire and David Simon’s other work (this book inspired the series Homicide: Life on the Street, the show on which Simon cut his TV teeth), but for anyone interested in how a the police department of a beshitted (as one of Simon’s characters might say) American city, or indeed anyone interested in modern city life.
1 Merlin Mann has a great piece about how the attention to detail makes The Wire so compelling.
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