A true crime classic from the creator of THE WIRE
David Simon's Homicide won the Edgar and Anthony awards and became the basis for the NBC award-winng drama. Simon's second book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of An Inner-City Neighbourhood, co-authored with Edward Burns, was made into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries. Simon is currently an executive producer and writer for HBO's Peabody Award-winning series THE WIRE. He lives in Baltimore.
A masterpiece . . . [Simon] has exceptional literary gifts of eye
and ear. Few novelists have written so well about the corrosiveness
of the modern American city.
* * Martin Amis * *
A hard-nosed classic of modern crime reportage.
* * GQ * *
The true genius of [his] work is its scope . . . Homicide moves
beyond individual victims to tell the stories of those touched by
their deaths. By staring deep into the eyes of the departed, Simon
reveals the mysteries of the living.
* * Sunday Times * *
The real delight is the discovery of Simon's perfect ear for
dialogue; his masterful construction and pacing; and his empathy
for his occasionally brutal but nevertheless inspirational
subjects.
* * Observer * *
This brilliant book . . . [is] desolate, sharp, poetic and
passionate . . . Simon alternates between black humour and moments
of bleakness, and the restlessness of the violence that lies
underneath it all.
* * Financial Times * *
A staggering work that is almost impossible to put down . . . a
gripping depiction of America's culture of violence . . . Simon
conjures up his subjects' individual personalities in
three-dimensional detail. The detectives leap off these pages . . .
A raw, revelatory and utterly real account of life and death in
Baltimore.
* * Metro * *
A remarkable psychological and personal picture of 18 men labouring
under immense pressure in traumatic circumstances . . . it is not
just a majestic piece of reporting, it demonstrates Simon's
instinctive ability to identify how the political and psychological
interact . . . It reads like a thriller as he takes you through the
desperate world of inner city West and East Baltimore, slaying by
slaying.
* * Daily Telegraph * *
Homicide is as intense a work of observation as you're likely ever
to find, studded with Simon's caustic, wry and suspicious
personality, as well as the ability to portray people as they truly
are, usually a complicated shade of gray.
* * Herald * *
Brushes away the accretions of myth to reveal the banality of crime
. . . it's a sober, unsurprised account of the desperately sad
lives of people who commit most crimes and a quiet testimonial to
the people who clear up the mess.
* * Word Magazine * *
David Simon has single handedly raised the bar for writing about
crime, crime-fighting and the messy and imprecise business of
justice to new and nearly unreachable levels. Like the WIRE, which
was easily the finest dramatic series in the history of television,
a work of tremendous ambition which made everything in the genre to
follow irrelevent.
* * Tony Bourdain * *
The best book about homicide detectives by an American writer.
* * Norman Mailer * *
Simon does an extraordinary job of getting under the skin and into
the minds of the police officers.
* * New York Times Book Review * *
Remarkable . . . A True Crime Classic . . . a journalistic
masterpiece of a brutal, bloody, bewildering year in the Baltimore
Police Department's homicide unit.
* * Associated Press * *
A reporter who keeps his wits about him . . . A very good book.
* * The New Yorker * *
Simon has captured the poetry of the meanest streets.
* * Los Angeles Times * *
Certainly one of the most engrossing police procedural mystery
books ever written, not only because the crimes and plots and
personalities are real, but because Simon is a terrific writer who
has mastered the necessities and nuances of his material.
* * Newsday * *
The world of urban violence has never been so well portrayed, nor
has the day-to-day craft of the detective.
* * Chicago Tribune * *
Virtually ignored by TV schedulers and audiences in the UK, David
Simon's uncompromising crime drama 'The Wire' has fan a devoted fan
base on DVD in September. At the same time Canongate bring us a new
UK edition of the book that started it all, David Simon's True
Crime classic HOMICIDE. Unavailable for 15 years and a great read
in its own right, he follows Baltimore's homicide department over
the course of a year. This new 'Wire'-inspired jacket is sure to
appeal to fans.
* * Bookseller * *
Simon followed a group of Baltimore detectives through a year on
the mean streets. The resulting book is a hefty volume, giving
Simon cope for a huge amount of detail and it's this, I think, that
makes it such compulsive reading. How the detectives work - the
crime they dace, the casual murders, the hopeless lives - all seen
through Simon's eyes and those of the detectives he follows so
closely. Homicide became the inspiration behind the TV series The
Wire, which I've not seen, but who needs fiction when factual
writing is as good as this?
* * Publishing News * *
An extraordinary book.
* * Guardian * *
Homicide is a beautifully-written, almost poetic observation of a
desperately harrowing subject and Simon deserves the highest praise
for going to the darkest places of the underbelly of the American
dream and coming out with a gripping account of what it is like to
live and work there.
* * Tribune * *
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