Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991)

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) by David Simon: Once upon a time, a Baltimore crime reporter managed to get a year 'embedded' with Baltimore's Homicide detectives. The year was 1988, the reporter was David Simon, and the result wasn't just this terrific book -- ultimately, the result was David Simon's entry into the entertainment industry, resulting in the TV shows Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner, The Wire, and so much more.

For those like myself coming to the non-fiction book after the assorted TV series about crime in Baltimore, some of the fun is spotting things that would appear in somewhat different form on TV. The murder that inspired the haunting Adena Watson story-line on Homicide: Life on the Street is here, heart-rending and awful. So too a number of other homicides. I'll leave you to play spot the crime. And spot the detectives who inspired Simon and Company's fictional detectives!

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is a terrific, gripping, moving book. It's also a corrective to any number of cop-show cliches and misrepresentations. Simon also lays out the departmental and city politics that provided the background to any number of episodes of Homicide and The Wire, and the foreground too.

But it's probably the characterization of the homicide detectives and their highers-up that makes Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets so memorable. These are men as interesting as any of Simon's fictional creations. We see how different detectives detect differently. We see some of them become obsessed by unsolvable cases. We definitely see the coarse, obscene badinage that marks most homicide detectives. In the face of death, a certain measure of dark levity is often necessary.

Amongst all the horror, there's even a weird sort of comedy in one case involving insurance scams and a lot of dead bodies. The case as it plays out is both grim and so outlandish that it seems impossible to fictionalize -- no one would believe it. In all, this is a truly great piece of non-fiction, as gripping as any novel or any of Simon's fictional work. Highly recommended.