First published in 1991, this true crime classic has just been released in Australia for the first time. It’s significant for a number of reasons – but most of all, because it launched the career of David Simon, creator of the much-praised (now defunct) HBO series The Wire. Simon, a police reporter on the Baltimore Sun, took a year’s leave to hang out in the Baltimore homicide department as a ‘police intern’, writing down everything he saw and heard. The result is a masterful work of reportage. It’s no coincidence that one of the many notables who’ve raved about Homicide is Norman Mailer: Simon’s writing is part of the novelistic tradition of journalism-as-storytelling that Mailer helped to pioneer.

Simon was the first reporter ever to gain unlimited access to a homicide department. However, despite the wealth of information he gathered in his year as an embedded journalist, it’s the telling observational details and shrewd interpretations of what he’s seen that make this book special. A hardened homicide detective covers the exposed chest and shoulder of an overdosed addict as her husband approaches. In a cramped rowhouse whose inhabitants piss into communal buckets and pile plates in layers that chart the week’s meals, a ten-year-old boy politely asks police if he can retrieve his spelling homework. Again and again, despair and disgust marry with a deep compassion for the beleaguered citizens of Baltimore (one of America’s top ten crime capitals). The camaraderie and tensions between the detectives lies at the heart of the book: the opening pages plunge the reader into the “diseased” humour of two detectives trading banter at a murder scene.

Underpinning the book is a sophisticated understanding of the social, political and historical context informing contemporary Baltimore (and America). Race is always an issue, whether it’s about a jury verdict or negotiating a career. And the resources poured into specific cases depend on media attention and political pressure as much as the particulars of the cases themselves.

Ironically for a book that launched a television career, Homicide makes a point of bemoaning the deleterious effect of television on crime investigation. (The too-perfect cases in shows like CSI make it increasingly hard to convince a jury to convict on much messier real-life evidence.) Fortunately, there is nothing neat or perfect about Homicide. Like life in the city it depicts, it is a sprawling, intriguing, surprising and endlessly fascinating read, with no easy answers, but plenty of open-ended questions to explore.

This review was originally published in The Big Issue.