Book review: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

Review by DAVID ROBINSON

EVEN in a city where murder is so common that it doesn't make the next day's papers, there are always exceptions and Latonya Wallace was one. Red balls, they call them in the homicide department. Murders that matter.

She was 11, a good kid from a poor part of town, last seen by her family heading for the library. In the world she left behind, hers is the biggest "say cheeseburger" smile in the livingroom photos. On the fridge door, a painting of blue sky, a big house, a happy child and a grinning dog, and a mimeographed list of PTA events.

Back in the homicide department, you can tell it's a classic red ball because it's 8pm and the day shift ended hours ago but nobody's leaving. There's a new guy leading the team, and he'll have his work cut out: the strangled, eviscerated body was found in an alley washed clean by rain and there are no witnesses.

And so it starts, just another case in red on the Baltimore Police homicide department's whiteboard, just another one of the 240-plus murders that its 36 officers will work through that year, hunting down the evidence, witnesses and confessions that will, with luck and streetwise savvy, solve them.

But that year – 1988 – Baltimore's finest had someone other than their squad supervisor looking over their work as they went about their daily business of evening the score on behalf of their city's violently deceased. Sitting in their offices ("a mouse tossed into a room of cats"), drinking with them in their bars, going with them out into the mean streets and back again to the city morgue, was a disillusioned reporter from the Baltimore Sun called David Simon.

These days we know Simon best as the creator of The Wire, which despite everyone saying it really IS the best TV drama series on the small screen. And a large part of what makes it so can be seen right here, in his first book, first published in the States in 1991 and a classic piece of reportage in its own right.

Until now, though, it's never been published in Britain, which is odd given that Homicide, a fictionalised TV series based on it – and for which Simon wrote a few episodes, starting his career as a scriptwriter – was screened for six full seasons in the 1990s. Fortunately, just in time for today's launch of the DVD set of the final series of The Wire, Canongate has published Simon's stunning debut to show a British readership just what they've been missing.

Which is necessary, because to the best of my knowledge, in British journalism there's never been anything like it. Of course, there have been plenty background books, some even tolerably good, about sensational murder cases. But what Simon is doing, with his keen ear for dialogue, and a born storyteller's feel for characterisation, is altogether different. He's not just showing us one red ball case – Latonya Wallace's killer is actually never found – but how cases like hers overlap and overshadow the other sort on a veritable production-line of death investigation.

A great reporter knows how a city works, how office politics at the head of a bureaucracy like its police force can work their way down the thin blue line to the streets. There, he'll understand the deadly economics of the street-corner drug dealers, and what if anything can be done to dull their pull. Piece the two together, and you've got a classic portrait of the seamy underbelly of the modern city and its underpaid, overworked, heavy-drinking, adrenalin-fuelled, occasionally idealistic defenders.