Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (David Simon, 1991/2006)

I picked up Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets probably for the same reason a lot of other people will have done, because as the front cover says it's from 'the creator of The Wire', David Simon. And while I've only got through the first season of what it supposed to be the best show on TV, that didn't stop me being intrigued by this work of non-fiction, that Simon wrote in 1991 and formed the basis of the US crime drama Homicide: Life on the Street.

This book was more compelling than any other non-fiction book I've read. I was utterly absorbed by the cast of detectives, criminals and and civilians. Simon's prose is a pleasure to read, and he makes the process of homicide investigations so easy to understand and yet he writes with grand brush strokes, giving an overview of the whole process in chunks along the way. He explains crime scene investigation (such as it was in 1988, no shiny CSI-style stuff here), interrogation techniques, how white murders differ from black, police internal investigations, autopsies, court-rooms and juries... I really feel that he gives an entire picture of what life is like for a homicide detective. 

Simon followed this squad of Baltimore detectives for a year, and his immersion in their world shows through - not only does he detail the heartbreaking child murders, the frustration of whodunnits, the joy of dunkers, the meaninglessness of yet another drug-killing, he also picks out the gallows humour of those poor souls who's job it is to clean up after so much destruction, he shows how some detectives are haunted by particular cases, and the camaraderie of these men (and they're all men) is sometimes touching, often laugh-out-loud funny. 

The front cover quotes the Daily Telegraph as saying Homicide 'reads like a thriller' and I'd have to agree - the scope, the attention given to each character, the sheer readable nature of the narrative, they all add up to the classic thriller, but with the added edge of these characters being living, breathing, real people. After I'd devoured the 600+ pages of the original text, I was pleased to read Simon's 2006 post-script, which provided an update on where the detectives are now, and how his book influenced his TV shows that followed. It's the cherry on an overwhelming delicious cake, albeit one filled with gunshot wounds, grieving relatives and world-weary police - a masterpiece.