Books |
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
David Simon
By
Published: Feb 02, 2009
Category:
Non Fiction
I keep hearing that The Wire is the greatest series in the history of television.
I missed it. And, rather than do remedial viewing, I thought I’d catch up with David Simon, who created and produced it, by dipping into the book that started it all for him — Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Sure, it was 672 pages, but I was only going to sample it, right?
There went two days.
Life is messy and complex, and perhaps nowhere more than in a big-city police force. In 1987, Simon, a Baltimore Sun reporter with a taste for nastiness, wrote to the chief of police to suggest a book: a year with a squad of homicide detectives. To his astonishment, the chief agreed. (A homicide detective’s explanation: “Hey, he had a brain tumor.”)
1988 was a year in which 234 people were murdered in Baltimore. Simon begins with a guy who was shot with a small-caliber gun. (“Now a bigger wound, like from a thirty-eight, you’re gonna have to get a new head.”) That the homicide detectives are irreverent is no surprise; their professionalism and inventiveness are. You’ve got to study the body. In a drug-filled neighborhood — and in inner city Baltimore, what neighborhood isn’t? — you’ve got to cajole witnesses into coming forward. And the witnesses are mostly liars; before you interrogate them, you’ve got to read their psyches. Your gun? You use it so little you have to remember to take it from your desk drawer.
This is life in “the major leagues, the center ring, the show. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don’t think the Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell, no, he sent for a fucking detective. And it will always be that way, because the homicide unit of any urban police force has for generations been the natural habitat of the thinking cop.”
You know these detectives, because you have seen them, mildly fictionalized, on television, in the HBO series based on the book. They’re Yaphet Kotto, Ned Beatty, Andre Braugher, Kyle Secor, Melissa Leo and Richard Belzer. They’re very accomplished at playing cops, but the compression of television — even on HBO — makes a difference. As critics like to say. “The book is better.”
It is certainly more disturbing. Early in February, detectives find a body in a back yard. The victim has been sexually assaulted, stabbed and strangled. Her name: Latonya Wallace. Her age: eleven.
You are with the cops as they tell her family. As they canvas the neighborhood — a down-and-out street where, literally, they see a giant rat chase a cat. As they work on the case, month after month. There are a dozen other cases in these pages, but this is the one that haunted me and would probably obsess you, and as I read on, I was impatient for Simon to get back to it.
Impatient, but never annoyed. Because this book teaches you so much. Why the detectives much prefer a body found in a house. Why it’s smart to put a hand on the hood of a parked car, because if it’s warm, it may recently have been ditched. Why you don’t bother to lean on professional criminals after you’ve read them their rights. Why plea bargains make sense. How homicide detectives deal with death. And why the African American detective, the erudite son of a jazz musician, doesn’t get assigned to certain cases: “We need someone who sounds like a black guy.”
But, mostly, it’s the cases that grab you — the puzzles waiting to be solved. And the surprises, like, in October, a second murder of a little girl. And then a clue, from an old file: a murder of a girl who looks very much like Latonya Wallace. Detectives exult. Just as they cheer the connection between a tiny chip of paint of Latonya’s stocking and the paint on a certain doorway.
I won’t tell you how that plays out. Or what happens when a dozen jurors have to decide the fate of a man who has shot and blinded a police officer. Or who the Fish Man is. Or …. but you see the problem. To read “Homicide” is to enter into a world so vivid that you emerge changed and blinking, stunned by what you have learned about humanity on the edge and, not least, grateful for the guys on the homicide squad.
To buy “Homicide” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy the Kindle version of “Homicide” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy the DVD of “The Wire” from Amazon.com, click here.
