Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
by David Simon
Canongate, £8.99
As the great Randy Newman sang, his lyrical genius pared to the bone by the despair of his narrator: “Oh Baltimore, man it’s hard just to live, just to live.” It is, however, very easy to die a violent death, as viewers of the TV series The Wire know. The Wire has been widely praised for its authenticity and complexity. Two decades ago, its creator, David Simon, immersed himself in the world of crime, spending a year with the drug dealers and addicts on Baltimore’s street corners and another year shadowing the detectives charged with investigating homicide in a city where murder is a daily event. Canongate, cute as ever when it comes to marketing opportunities, have re-issued Homicide and The Corner to capitalise on the success of The Wire.
They provide vivid insights into the massive problems of America’s dying inner cities. In Homicide, Simon tracks three squads of the city’s homicide unit in 1988. We learn the methods and characters of these men (detection is a deeply macho world) as they tackle a tidal wave of death and mayhem. There are the no-brainers where a domestic row results in murder and the perpetrator is still at the scene; drug-related slayings that defy rhyme, reason and basic humanity; cold cases that drift for years with no resolution; and killings that strike to the core of even these hard-bitten professionals. Such a case is the abduction and brutal murder of an 11-year-old girl; its high media profile ensures political intervention and increases the pressure on detectives.
Simon writes with enormous empathy for the herculean task of these police officers – who are, incidentally, all referred to by their actual names. He does not shirk from the endemic sexism, casual racism and personal problems such high-octane stress brings, from alcoholism and broken marriages to suicides. Such is his observational skill that the reader cares about each of these detectives as a living, breathing, fallible individual. We come away with an enhanced understanding of the monumental problems facing inner-city policing and of the subtle craft employed in bringing cases to trial. Homicide is a beautifully-written, almost poetic observation of a desperately harrowing subject and Simon deserves the highest praise for going to the darkest places of the underbelly of the American dream and coming out with a gripping account of what it is like to live and work there.
Peter Whittaker
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