Homicide

True crime

First published: 1991
Print length: 646 pagesHenry Holt and Company, 2006

Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime

Description

David Simon spent a year alongside detectives in Baltimore’s Homicide Unit, observing how they responded to killing as both human catastrophe and daily work. His account follows investigations from the first search of a crime scene through interrogations, arrests, and courtroom testimony, while cases move between the absurd, the eccentric, and the devastating. Set during the late-1980s crime wave, the book shows detectives laboring under relentless caseloads, incomplete evidence, institutional pressure, and the knowledge that justice will often be partial. Simon’s compassionate but unsentimental reporting strips away the heroic mythology of police work, replacing it with procedural detail and close attention to the habits, gallows humor, frustrations, and moral compromises that help investigators endure.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Descriptive · Direct · Journalistic

Pace

Variable

Tone

Dark · Detached · Earnest · Tense

Structure

Chronological nonfiction · Episodic

Focus

Character · Information · Plot

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

Crime and punishmentJusticeMoralityTraumaWork

About David Simon

David Simon is a journalist, author, screenwriter, and producer whose books and television work grow from sustained observation of Baltimore institutions and neighborhoods. After years at The Baltimore Sun, he brought a reporter's attention to procedure, speech, and workplace culture into long-form narrative. Homicide follows a year beside the city's homicide detectives, moving from crime scenes and interrogations to arrests and courtrooms while keeping relentless caseloads, incomplete evidence, gallows humor, and moral compromise in view. Its yearlong structure makes investigation appear as daily labor rather than a sequence of isolated revelations. Simon and Ed Burns used another full year for The Corner, staying close to a West Baltimore family and the routines and pressures surrounding an open-air drug market. The same realistic dialogue and reliance on observed anecdotes carry into his screenwriting, including The Wire, which he created and led. Simon has said that authenticity to the people represented matters more to him than accommodating a general audience, an ethic reflected in his use of local language and institutional detail.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Language: English
ISBN: 9780805080759

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