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.
It Came from Outer Space: adapted by Harry Essex from a short story by Ray Bradbury; directed by Jack Arnold; starring Richard Carlson (John Putnam), Barbara Rush (Ellen Fields), Charles Drake (Sheriff) and Russell Johnson (George) (1953): Surprisingly thoughtful and methodically paced 1950's alien-invasion movie from the great Jack Arnold, with an assist from Ray Bradbury, who actually wrote much of the screenplay.
The Arizona landscapes make a perfect backdrop for a story of paranoia and infiltration that doesn't go where one might expect it to, given its Cold War origins. That's the Professor from Gilligan's Island (Russell Johnson) as a power lineman. If any screen aliens are the parents of Kodos and Kang from The Simpsons, it's these aliens. Recommended.
The Raven: written by Hannah Shakespeare and Ben Livingston; directed by James McTeigue; starring John Cusack (Edgar Allan Poe), Luke Evans (Detective Fields), Alice Eve (Emily Hamilton) and Brendan Gleeson (Captain Hamilton) (2012): Often jarringly anachronistic dialogue is the only major problem with this solid period thriller (it's set in Baltimore in the late 1840's). John Cusack makes an interesting Edgar Allan Poe, doomed (as history and the opening scene tell us) to die under mysterious circumstances within days of the movie's beginning.
But first he has to help a police detective stop a serial killer who's modelling his killings on Poe's short stories. Things look great, and the direction is moody and effective from V for Vendetta 's McTeigue. But boy, the dialogue stinks at points, and there are also several points at which the writers seem to lack a basic knowledge of Poe's body of work (when asked if he'd ever written about sailors, Poe says no, apparently forgetting The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", and about half-a-dozen other stories. Well, he is drunk and opium-besotted much of the time).
Luke Evans is also effective as a hyper-rational detective right out of a Poe -- C. Auguste Dupin, to be exact, the fictional ancestor of Sherlock Holmes. Oh, and there's no Oran-Outan in the movie, dammit, though Poe does have a pet raccoon whose fate is left unresolved at the end of the film. They've also got Jules Verne (who homaged Poe in From the Earth to the Moon with the space-faring Baltimore Gun Club) starting his writing career about 20 years early. Either that or the serial killer is also a time traveller. Recommended.
