Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
by David Simon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This softcover, printed in paperback size type, comes in at 622 pages (not counting the afterward), and though I enjoyed just about every page of the book, towards the end I was looking forward to finishing it and getting onto something else. Still, it’s a year long account from a reporter embedded with the Baltimore homicide detectives, and had the author written any less, it would have cheated the reader out of the story.
I picked up this book because of the HBO series, The Wire, the first season of which I finished watching today, as well. The author is the show’s creator. Both The Wire and this book are excellent. David Simon provides great insight into police work and culture: the camaraderie among police, the frustrations of working within the constraints of bureaucracy and departmental politics, and the special talents and determination of the detectives. He gives you the whole picture, warts and all. The end page of my book has several notes marking the pages which cover the process of interrogations, the whole circus that is court trials and juries, life in the ghetto, and other particulars that an outsider would never understand otherwise.
Simon does a great job of writing and, especially, of making some kind of sense and order out of the events of the year. The book’s prose and organization are top notch. I think anyone with an interest in the nexus of police, our legal system, and society would find this book interesting and well worth reading.
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