Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

AUTHOR: David Simon

PUBLISHED: 1991

GENRE: True Crime

Before The Wire, there was Homicide: Life on the Street.

Unlike The Wire, for which author-turned-television producer David Simon was given free rein on HBO, Homicide premiered in 1994 on a hostile NBC, whose executives offered little support and even less patience for the fledgling show.  For the entirety of its seven-year run, Homicide battled executive interference and viewer indifference, even as the critics screamed that it was the best show on television.  NBC’s discomfort was largely due to the unrelenting realism of the show, the likes of which had not been seen before on network television.  Homicide presented a Baltimore that was dark, ugly, violent.  Children shot children without remorse, murderers went unpunished because of a flawed legal system, and detectives dealt with it all by cracking jokes over the bodies of the dead.  But Homicide could never be accused of exaggerating the situation.  Not when its premise – a good portion of its story lines, in fact – was taken straight from the truth: Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.*

The idea was simple: Simon, then a newspaper reporter, would trail the Baltimore City Police Department’s Homicide Unit for a year.  1988 would see 234 murders in Baltimore, many of which would go unsolved and unpublished.  Over 500 more would be committed in the two years it took to write the book.  Simon’s story is a chronicle of the victims, of the guilty, and most of all of the detectives, all desperately trying to do their jobs and keep their sanity.  Simon strips his pages of all pretension, leaving only the unvarnished facts for the reader. 

Homicide introduced the public to such words of wisdom as everyone lies (murderers because they have to, witnesses because they think they have to, and everyone else for the joy of it) and an innocent man twitches and sweats in the interrogation room while a guilty man sleeps.   It introduced us to the battle-scared veterans of the Homicide squad, who allowed themselves to be chronicled cracking jokes and acting extraordinarily politically incorrect over dead bodies, because when you work in a city where violence is an accepted experience, that's the way you survive.  It introduced us to the truth about a city dying before the world's eyes, and the valiant cops just trying to stop the bleeding.

Baltimore has done a lot to rebuild in the 20 years since the book came out.  But Homicide still stands as a potent reminder of what could be, and of what it took to hold it together. 

LENGTH: 626 pages

MAINSTREAM OR NOT: No, despite being responsible for 2 of the most critically-acclaimed shows in television history.
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT: Yes.  It's a fascinating look into what all residents of Baltimore went through during some very hard times.

*From the episode "The Documentary": a scene taken almost word-for-word from the book: