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A review by gregbrown
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon
5.0
For the most part, despite being set 25 years ago the book still holds up. Of course, the Internet has changed things to an extent, but the maze of conflicting databases of private information likely still holds true. DNA evidence has been the other major revolution, with it playing a minor role in the book, but improving immensely in the time since. Oddly enough, the most dated part of the book is the uncritical use of FBI profiling, a pseudo-scientific practice that has since fell out of grace. Also still operant is the use of arson investigators, a field of hunches and word-of-mouth that's responsible for sending at least one innocent man to his death at the hands of the state.
The characters are sharp, enjoyable, and thoroughly human. Simon does a wonderful job of getting inside their heads, something that I hadn't been able to experience previously due to the constraints of TV and the non-subjective storytelling of The Wire. In historical works like The Devil in the White City, writing this kind of internal monologue is off putting, especially when poorly-done. But Simon's angle works, because he spent a year with the squad; even if he wasn't able to directly channel their personalities by the end—and I don't doubt that he could—he could certainly just ask them what they were thinking. As a result, we don't just get a sense of the procedural aspects of detective work, but also a more thorough idea of its epistemology—how theories are born and perish, how innocuous behavior becomes suspicious and then innocuous again as the detective tries out various ideas.
More interestingly, perhaps, we get an idea of the detectives' value structure, and that of the police as a whole. Certain deaths are expected—that of those involved in the drug trade and other blue collar crimes, as well as the inner-city poor more generally. But there are others that warrant much more attention from the police: children, especially white ones; church officials; community leaders. These cases are called red balls, and get the most police work precisely because they garner the most attention from politicians, the media, and by extension the general public. This isn't to say that police are exempt from blame, but instead that it's an outgrowth of wider societal priorities, of a culture grown inured to throwing away the lives of the lower class by dismissing them as morally-culpable, but eager to maintain a firewall that insists that the innocent and the well-off should not be tainted by that same violence. It's a twisted sort of morality play—staged on the local news and in patrol cars alike—that justifies the latent racism and continuing neglect levied against the inner-city and its residents. Simon certainly shares this view, as he's said so directly in interviews and essays since. But in Homicide, it mostly lurks in the background, slowly constructed by the specific evidence that he brings to bear over the course of 600 pages.
There are some cases where Simon zooms out to cover a topic more abstractly, such as his 18-page jag about the reality of the Miranda warning, and it's in those cases where he demonstrates his greatest control over tone. He can slip from explaining the overall picture, to re-enacting dialogue, to addressing the reader as if you were one of the characters. He has the tremendous ability to get inside the minds of every player, and hold them all in his head simultaneously—a talent that no doubt came in handy for The Wire.
He crosses back to that subject in the Post Mortem, where he recounts the impact of the book in its subsequent TV series, follow-up projects, and eventually the grand study of Baltimore that was The Wire. So many of The Wire's scenes echo anecdotes from the book, to the point where I'd almost recommend you watch the series before reading the book, to get maximum juice out of arguably the best television ever made (and best work of literature of the 21st century so far, in my opinion). Simon's ear for dialogue informs all his work, and if you enjoyed what he's produced for the screen, you'll love this book. And some of the stories shared, such as the positively insane Geraldine Parrish tale, are worth the price of admission alone. It's a surprisingly long book, but the fastest 600 pages I've read in quite a while.
The characters are sharp, enjoyable, and thoroughly human. Simon does a wonderful job of getting inside their heads, something that I hadn't been able to experience previously due to the constraints of TV and the non-subjective storytelling of The Wire. In historical works like The Devil in the White City, writing this kind of internal monologue is off putting, especially when poorly-done. But Simon's angle works, because he spent a year with the squad; even if he wasn't able to directly channel their personalities by the end—and I don't doubt that he could—he could certainly just ask them what they were thinking. As a result, we don't just get a sense of the procedural aspects of detective work, but also a more thorough idea of its epistemology—how theories are born and perish, how innocuous behavior becomes suspicious and then innocuous again as the detective tries out various ideas.
More interestingly, perhaps, we get an idea of the detectives' value structure, and that of the police as a whole. Certain deaths are expected—that of those involved in the drug trade and other blue collar crimes, as well as the inner-city poor more generally. But there are others that warrant much more attention from the police: children, especially white ones; church officials; community leaders. These cases are called red balls, and get the most police work precisely because they garner the most attention from politicians, the media, and by extension the general public. This isn't to say that police are exempt from blame, but instead that it's an outgrowth of wider societal priorities, of a culture grown inured to throwing away the lives of the lower class by dismissing them as morally-culpable, but eager to maintain a firewall that insists that the innocent and the well-off should not be tainted by that same violence. It's a twisted sort of morality play—staged on the local news and in patrol cars alike—that justifies the latent racism and continuing neglect levied against the inner-city and its residents. Simon certainly shares this view, as he's said so directly in interviews and essays since. But in Homicide, it mostly lurks in the background, slowly constructed by the specific evidence that he brings to bear over the course of 600 pages.
There are some cases where Simon zooms out to cover a topic more abstractly, such as his 18-page jag about the reality of the Miranda warning, and it's in those cases where he demonstrates his greatest control over tone. He can slip from explaining the overall picture, to re-enacting dialogue, to addressing the reader as if you were one of the characters. He has the tremendous ability to get inside the minds of every player, and hold them all in his head simultaneously—a talent that no doubt came in handy for The Wire.
He crosses back to that subject in the Post Mortem, where he recounts the impact of the book in its subsequent TV series, follow-up projects, and eventually the grand study of Baltimore that was The Wire. So many of The Wire's scenes echo anecdotes from the book, to the point where I'd almost recommend you watch the series before reading the book, to get maximum juice out of arguably the best television ever made (and best work of literature of the 21st century so far, in my opinion). Simon's ear for dialogue informs all his work, and if you enjoyed what he's produced for the screen, you'll love this book. And some of the stories shared, such as the positively insane Geraldine Parrish tale, are worth the price of admission alone. It's a surprisingly long book, but the fastest 600 pages I've read in quite a while.