Page to Screen: Homicide

I’ve been watching Netflix DVD’s of the late, lamented Homicide: Life of the Street lately, and a little while back, I went through the DVED’s of the first season of The Wire, which shares some of the same creative team. In particular, both series were based in part on work by David Simon, whose Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets tracked the Homicide unit of the Baltimore Police for a full year.

I’ve been curious about the book for a while, and finally checked it out of the library a couple of weeks ago. It’s a fascinating story in its own right– Simon had unprecedented access to the department, following detectives around on cases and into court for all of 1988. The book is full of fascinating details about the practices and procedures of the unit, as well as the backgrounds of the detectives. If you’re interested in the story of crime and punishment in the US legal system, it’s well worth reading.

As a fan of the tv shows, though, it’s especially fascinating to see how the book contains the seeds of both shows. Specific examples are below the fold, to protect the spoiler-averse, and those who just don’t give a damn.

The most obvious thing is the characters. Tim Bayliss is clearly based off Tom Pellegrini, a young detective recently assigned to the unit off the Mayor’s security detail. Harry Edgerton provides the seeds for both Frank Pembleton (a highly educated black detective, a bit of a loner, known to be a good interrogator) and a bit of Jimmy McNulty from The Wire (he gets in trouble with his Homicide colleagues for going off on long-term investigations of drug dealers). Al Giardello is clearly partly based on Gary D’Addario, Jay Landsman is a joking sergeant in both real life and The Wire, and so on. The political situation in both series is also clearly based in reality.

What was a little more surprising to me is the way that real cases are reflected in the show. The book is dominated to a large degree by the murder of Latonya Wallace, an 11-year-old girl found dead in a back alley, whose case becomes an obsession for Tom Pellegrini. The real-life case described in the book is almost identical to the Adena Watson storyline that dominates the first season or two of Homicide, with the same basic list of players and suspects, some of the same dramatic setpieces (a busload of cadets searching the alley, a late-night search for a repossessed car, the final climactic interrogation), and the same lack of resolution. The tv show compressed the events in time, but in most other respects, the fictional portrayal is chillingly accurate.

Weirder still, an episode that I had written off as pure made-for-tv comedy turns out to be based on a real case, that of one Geraldine Parrish, who murdered a long series of slightly dim husbands and other relatives in order to collect on their life insurance. That one seemed too goofy to be true, but it plays out on screen almost exactly the way it apparently did in real life, including the botched exhumation scene. Truth, once again, is at least as strange as fiction.

There are fewer exact parellels with events in The Wire, though at least one conversation gets repeated verbatim on the show. The humor and dialogue in the book is much closer to The Wire than Homicide, as you would expect from the fact that you can say “fuck” on HBO, but not on NBC. The producers of Homicide did an impressively good job of catching the basic spirit of the dialogue, though, within the constraints of the form. The detectives here aren’t quite as philosophical as Pembleton and Bayliss, but their interaction is similar to what ends up on screen.

One other interesting point, not related to the tv shows: mixed in with the case stories and exploration of the justice system (there’s a great riff on the Miranda law, and a nice breakdown of the real outcomes of murder cases in Baltimore) are a set of stories about the detectives themselves, and their backgrounds. These are fascinating to read, and some of the guys in the unit seem to have led really interesting lives. On reading this sort of thing, though, I always find myself wondering how much of this is because their lives really are interesting, and how much is because a sufficiently good writer can find a way to make just about anything interesting. Probably a little of both, in this case– Simon does a nice job with the detectives he profiles, but he does leave a few out.

All in all, this is an impressive and surprising book. Simon got unfettered access to the Homicide unit for a full year, and it’s a little amazing that he got permission to tell the stories that he does. In an Afterword, he does note that he left out a few things to avoid compromising open cases,and deleted a few minor details to avoid embarassing certain detectives, but otherwise was not edited. That’s really unexpected for a major urban department, and refelcts well on everybody involved.

The fact that he also managed to parlay this into two really excellent tv shows is a nice bonus.

5 thoughts on “Page to Screen: Homicide

  1. There are fewer exact parellels with events in The Wire, though at least one conversation gets repeated verbatim on the show

    Which one?

  2. The conversation that I know is repeated verbatim is one where McNulty and Bunk get drunk, and McNulty says something about “When it was time for you to fuck me, you were gentle…”

  3. Another repeated bit (also a McNulty/Bunk drunken conversation) is the bit about Bunk going home to shoot the rat with his service weapon. Its lifted from a Terry McLarney incident. (Who even appears as Lt Melo, Bunny Colvin’s right hand man in the third season; its a bit part, but he’s there).

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