Homicide

David Simon (yes, that David Simon, creator of The Wire, Treme, etc) began as a beat writer for the Baltimore Sun and he spent the entire year of 1988 hanging with the Baltimore police department's Homicide squad. They eventually kind of forgot who he was and he got an honest portrayal of the violence in Baltimore. And this was even before the serious drug killings started!

And yeah, it is grim and riveting and dark humored. I don't know how these guys (and at the time it was nearly all guys) can do it. In 1988, Baltimore averaged about a killing a day and there were all kinds of them, from brutal rapes and assassinations of pre-teen girls, to beating deaths of toddlers, to drug killilngs and everything in between.

Simon does his best to humanize these guys, fighting a Sisyphusean task of trying to get justice for the murdered. There are interesting stories of office politics and he pulls no punches in describing the cops, both the good parts and the bad. He really got into their group and told some harrowing stories.

Perhaps it dragged a bit in the middle, but maybe that was by design. Even the reader gets inured to the real American carnage. He does his best to change up the storytelling in interesting ways, but man, it is a depressing thing.

This ebook had a couple of postscripts. One probably came with the original book, as it told a bit about where everyone was just before publication, about 18 months later. But this one also came with an extensive one added by Simon in 2005, so we get even more of a "where are they now". But this time, Simon had had some success with The Wire, and he talks a little bit about how he got into screenwriting, as NBC turned his book into the Homicide: Life on the Street series, of which he wrote 2 episodes. And a short one by one of the detectives too.

So yeah - grim but fascinating, a look inside a place and a time very few of us will ever since, thankfully. A must read, even today.