Homicide: a year on the killing streets

OK, so I posted this video on my main blog already. Sue me. The Wire rocks, and the show inspired me to read Homicide: a year on the killing streets, by David Simon.

Simon created The Wire based on his experience as a newspaper reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He spent a year with the Baltimore Homicide unit and wrote this book. Homicide chronicles a calendar year in a city with nearly 300 murders a year. The year was 1988, but the book ages well. Obviously, the information age was not yet as efficient, but the police work was a joy to read.

This book was fascinating, educational, shocking and hilarious all at the same time. Open cases are written in red, and turn to black once solved. The challenge is to keep the percentages high and the open murders at a minimum. "Red ball" cases are those with special importance. For example, a murdered child, political crime or police shooting each add their own unique problems.

Simon explains the legal obstacles to the job. There are frustrations, but the reader will get an up-close look at the balance between observance of rights and enforcement of law. It illustrates just how gray these matters can be. Both maddeningly so and thankfully so.

Most of all, however, this book is about the detectives. The murders and police work are interesting, but the characters are central. The homicide division is merely where they work and that world drives who they are.

The book starts in January and finishes the entire year. I couldn't have kept track of the pure number of murders covered, but many stick out. There was an older woman who hired contract killers to murder family members and husbands so she could collect life insurance. She convinced family that she had voodoo powers, so they never told. Many murders involved basic quarrels that led to gunfire. Drug murders, domestic disputes... anything you can imagine. Interestingly, the type of murder drives the expectation for a solution. Domestics? Usually an easy solution. Drug murder? Almost never a solution.

The best stuff, however, is the gallows humor. I can't get enough of that.

Some of my favorite quotes and scenes:

- "More often than not, the last visage of a murdered man resembles that of a flustered schoolchild to whom the logic of a simple equation has just been revealed."

- "... ninety cases out of a hundred, the investigator's saving grace is the killer's overwhelming predisposition toward incompetence or, at the very least, gross error."

- "Fuck the why, a detective will tell you; find out the how, and nine times out of ten it'll give you the who."

- "'You shoot a guy, hey,' the sergeant adds with a shrug. 'You shoot another guy - well, okay, this is Baltimore. You shoot three guys, it's time to admit you have a problem.'"

- "Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly noted that for those responsible, the act of murder 'is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or frighten him from his ordinary notice or trifles.' And while West Baltimore is a universe or two from Emerson's nineteenth-century Massachusetts hamlet, the observation is still useful. Murder often doesn't unsettle a man. In Baltimore, it usually does not even ruin his day."

- "Who found her?" the detail officer asked.
"Post officer from the Central."
"Did the guy rape her?"
"The officer?" asked Landsman, feigning confusion. "Um, I don't think so. Maybe. We didn't ask him 'cause we figured the guy who killed her did that."
In any other world, the comedy would be appalling."

- On how reliable a victim can be before he actually dies:
"Yeah. We asked him who shot him."
"And?"
"He said, 'Fuck you.'"

- The officers rigged a copy machine to be like a lie detector and have gotten confessions that way. How? They would put pages in the machine with "True" or "False" already printed on them. They would place the hand of the suspect on the outside of the machine. True, True and False would be rigged to come out in that order. Two easy questions would be followed by a direct question about guilt. The stories are hilarious.

I did not rig this, but Homicide is going to be hard to beat for the rest of the year. (Dave, stop looking at me.). I am sure I will read many other good books this year (Seriously, Dave, stop looking at me), but this one will have staying power. Just because a team starts the season ranked number 1 doesn't mean it has an edge or the system is rigged (What? Do I have something on my face?... Dave, this is getting creepy... stop it!).

This book would have been a top 3 last year and it's out in front now. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.