Despair has many faces. It lives in the crumbling facades of vacant buildings relinquished to economic decay. It beds down with the homeless, encouraging them to surrender to the cruel vicissitudes of fate. It aids criminals, allowing them to take financial nourishment from the hopeless. And it saps at the will of those good souls who try to make a difference. Despair is not only pernicious, it's cancerous, metastasizing through the body of society until it's driven its corrupting tentacles into every aspect of life.
For all of despair's power, it can be attacked. After all, it does not just appear from nowhere; it has a source from which its darkness flows. But what is that source? We may have our own opinions, but they will not sway Mr. Simon. For he is firmly, and understandably, convinced that this despair flows from institutions which all-too-rarely function as they ought. Homicide is a masterful illustration of his contention.
The year is 1987 and Baltimore, Maryland's largest city, is awash in corpses. Stabbed and beaten, shot and crushed, they appear crumpled on her streets, sprawled on the floors of her apartments, and abandoned like trash in her alleys. Young and old, male and female, gangsters and citizens, they are Baltimore's murdered, victims of a thousand crimes. Some were felled by a more violent culture while others were ruined by an ever-more competitive drug trade. Some were cut down out of opportunism while others were discarded by whim. Whatever the cause, whatever the circumstance, they will all, more than 200 of them this calendar year, find their way into the minds and the casefiles of the homicide division of the Baltimore Police Department.
Overworked and underpaid, plagued by problematic bosses and burdened by foolish policies, they are the men and women who labor to solve murders in one of America's most violent cities. Every day, they are called into Baltimore's poverty-riddled streets, to bloody crime scenes with bodies chalked out in the dust. And from this, they must find truth, to pull it from silent witnesses and lying relatives, to lift it from trace evidence and leaps of logic, to rest from the cosmos the knowledge necessary to collar a murderer. After all, a society that allows its killers to roam free, unafraid of the long arm of the law, is no society at all.
In Homicide, Mr. Simon, then a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, chronicles his year attached to the homicide division of the BPD. For twelve long months, he rides in their cars, drinks with them at their bars, watches them in their interrogations and looks on as they collar their suspects. Night after night, case after case, he is a witness to men and women who overcome all of the obstructions placed before them to find some measure of justice for the fallen. This accumulated experience, the joyous and the painful, the exquisite and tragic, he bundles together, forms into a coherent narrative and lays down in this 600-page paean to police work in "the darkest corner of the American experiment."
Had Homicide merely liberated police work from the cliches of television, it would have been a success. Had it merely built on this achievement by painting vivid portraits of the colorful murder police who roamed Baltimore's streets in the final years of the 20th century, it'd be wonderfully instructive. In Homicide Mr. Simon digs deeper, beneath the cases and the headlines, the criminals and their pursuers, to mine deeper truths, that we are all part of a corrupt system; that systems generally, no matter how large, are corruptible; that to sin against those few souls who try to keep the system functioning is itself criminal; and that to fail to recognize this, to fail to act against this corruption, is not only a sin against those who are murdered and victimized by the system and its policies, it's a crime against those few brave and battered souls who risk their lives and their mental health in order to keep the system functional. This is why Mr. Simon's work here rises to the level of masterpiece. It is why The Wire is, even years after concluding its run, still considered by the wise to be one of the most powerful television shows in living memory.
A read made both momentous and memorable by its subjects, its themes, its world, and its author's devastating prose. Outstanding work... (5/5 Stars)
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