I adore the Wire. In my view it is the best drama ever to have graced our TV screens. A lot of the events are based on what David Simon learnt from a year as a journalist embedded in the Baltimore police department.

The book is chronological and episodic. We follow the detectives in one of the two homicide squads throughout the calender year, flipping from one depressing case to another. Within the description of the cases, various processes are described - the judicial process and forensics for example.

The structure works well on the whole, although its sometimes hard to keep track of all the different cases in your mind - one may be described 200 pages in and then not again for another couple of hundred.

The style is very journalistic, generaly pure reportage and not much commentary. Simon lets the facts do the talking, and very eloquent they are too. Simon falls too much in love with the detectives - he admits as much and its pretty obvious from the text.

Generally, this is an enjoyable book but much of its content is pretty much known to followers of the Wire - the profligacies of the war on drugs, the overweening supremacy of statistics etc. It's also bloated. At least 200 pages could have been cut without losing much. ( )

There has been a push of the Wire related books by Simon and Burn since the BBC started showing the series. The book does what the title says - Simon closely followed the activities of a set of homicide detectives over a year and chronicles their work, their practices, the politics around them and their thoughts on all this and each other.
It's a book that delights in detail and if you are sick of things being dumbed down or trivialised, it's a tonic.
It is also fascinating for a Wire fan. Some of the stories and characters have clearly inspired parts of the series, and it's interesting to see their genesis.The Wire is a more rounded piece of writing than this, but this'll give you a deeper unstanding of the former and does nonetheless stand as a great piece of work. ( )

Interesting cases and detectives. Also, a lot of connections to the Wire. Put this and the Corner together and you have a pretty good understanding of the inner-city. I prefer to read about the non-police side though (The Corner) ( )

My husband brought this book home from the library because I loved The Wire. This gritty, cynical, humorous look at the Baltimore Homicide division is the root of that brilliant series. David Simon not only reveals the lives of the men who solve murders for a living, he holds a mirror up the political and cultural makeup of our society and what you see is not pretty. ( )

David Simon’s book has been the fiundation of a number of startling and ground-breaking television series. Latterly, Simon has been the inspiration behind The Wire.

This book gives us one year in the life of the Baltimore Police Department Homicide squad, looking at the people, the vicitms, the suspects and the criminals. Simon was allowed unprecedented access and uses his reportage skills to present a fly-on-the-wall picture of the whole seamy operation (as he says, like sasuages, you never want toknow what happens underneath).

The book fascinates with an amost hypnotic rhythm of death, investigation and retribution (sometimes). The detectives appear mostly like any other skilled office workers wrestling with procedures and paperwork and certainly not like avenging angels or near-superheroes.

Although Simon was allowed full access to the squad he still comes across as an outsider and I think this reduces the impact of the book somewhat. We do not see the full personal interplay of the detectives and they are still very two-dimensional.

The research was done in the late 1980s and although there seem to have been a few updates to the text, this shows. But maybe plus ca change…

I would strongly recommend this book as a salutory vision of the potential for failure in human society and what awaits us all if we are not vigilant. ( )