The man behind The Wire

A little over a year after the finale of The Sopranos, the curtain is also about to come down on another of the greatest television shows of all time. Debuting in 2002, The Wire – the final episodes of which are currently being broadcast Monday nights on TG4 – was, like David Chase’s gangster masterwork, produced by HBO, and proved to be a slow-burning success for the channel. Audiences took some time to get to grips with the show’s innovative approach, which saw episodes unfold at a leisurely pace, closer in style to the measured build-up of chapters in a novel, as opposed to the hectic tone more readily associated with standard American drama.

However, as The Wire progressed, it became apparent that its creator, David Simon, and his team of writers had crafted a remarkably compelling and insightful series. The show skilfully moved back and forth between the drug dealers on the street and the cops keeping tabs on them, and was quite brilliant on the politics involved in police work.
Subsequent seasons would focus on different institutions within Baltimore (be it City Hall, the public school system, the stevedores’ union or The Baltimore Sun newspaper) and the manner in which they betrayed their own people – the overall effect being to offer a panoramic view of modern life in a major US city. It was powerful stuff, and deservedly received rapturous critical praise.
Simon originally started out as a police reporter with The Baltimore Sun, but, dissatisfied with the way the paper was being run after a corporate buyout, opted to take a year out in 1988 to write a book on homicide detectives working in the city, eventually published in 1991 as Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets. The book received strong reviews, and was adapted into an NBC series, Homicide: Life On The Street.
Intrigued by the possibilities of television drama, Simon wrote several episodes of the show, and would go on to create his own mini-series for HBO, The Corner (based on his second book, co-authored with detective Ed Burns), which in turn led to The Wire. Earlier this year, Canongate acquired the rights to republish Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, and to promote the book, Simon will later this month attend a special screening of The Wire in the Irish Film Institute, after which he will participate in a public interview with Hot Press writer Peter Murphy.
Ahead of his visit to Dublin, Simon talked exclusively to Hot Press. Though quietly spoken, the writer makes for a fascinating interviewee, and had plenty to say about the year he spent hanging out with detectives in Baltimore, the state of contemporary journalism, influences on The Wire and future plans – including his unlikely ambition to make a comedy film.

PAUL NOLAN: Looking back 20 years in retrospect, do you now view Homicide as a book which launched your later career?
DAVID SIMON: Yeah, it was the first time I tried writing anything longer than a magazine story. It turned out well enough that my book editor signed me up for another one, and once my newspaper went south – we were bought by out-of-town ownership and carpetbagged – that provided an opportunity to do meaningful work. And then absurdly, given that there was absolutely no plan for it, the book sold to television, and this weird stepchild came to town, in the form of Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana’s production of Homicide.
At some point, almost on a lark, because at the time I was trying to finish the second draft of The Corner, I took a job writing for the TV adaptation of Homicide, and I thought, ‘I’ll learn this skill-set. I don’t know that I’ll actually get involved in television, but it’ll be an interesting thing to learn.’ That was 1995 and 13 years later I’m still in television. So everything sort of sprung from that one open-ended adventure of going into the homicide unit for a year. It was amazing they let me in. I was surprised that they said yes, I was surprised when they didn’t throw me out after a week… I was surprised by a lot of things. But it was a year that I wouldn’t trade for anything. It was enormously fascinating, and I really enjoyed a lot of those guys.
You talk in the early part of the book about the detectives’ extraordinary dedication to the job, but it also showed remarkable commitment on your behalf to work on the project for a full year. You mention in the afterword that your marriage was breaking up at the time.
It was the perfect time to do the book. I have a son now, who’s 14-years-old. I can’t imagine being able to do that job to the degree I did with a child, or with a viable relationship. It really was the ideal year for me to lose myself in that unit. A lot of serendipitous stuff happened; they put me on the right shift, and I met a bunch of interesting people. A month ago, Terry McLarney was named the head of the homicide unit. He’s still there, and he just made major. There’s a couple of guys still left, although most of them have moved on. It has been 20 years.
Did you find that most of these detectives essentially dedicated their lives to the job?
Yeah, there weren’t a lot of 9-to-5 guys in that unit. There were a couple of guys who were absolute humps, who I didn’t concentrate on, because they were not good detectives. Out of 36 guys, you’re bound to get the full spectrum of people. But by and large, there’s a lot of self-motivation involved in people who make it all the way to the homicide unit. In an American police department, and I’d imagine this is true in your part of the world as well, there are two hierarchies; the hierarchy of rank and the hierarchy of expertise. In the hierarchy of expertise, death investigation is right up there, and if you’ve made it to that point, you’ve probably decided in your career to forgo things like the sergeant’s test; you’ve chosen one hierarchy over the other.
So then how good you are is a point of professional pride. What I didn’t see was a sort of idealised dedication to avenging the dead and righting wrongs, which is really a construct of our entertainment industry. The only time these guys would truly moralise, and I would buy it, was when it was a little kid or elderly person who was killed, or especially if it was another cop. Some real affront to everybody’s humanity. But for the most part, the murders are a given. You show up at the office and this is the problem. You assume when you pick up the phone you’re gonna go out there and there’s going to be somebody laying dead, and you’re going to puzzle it dispassionately.
I found that to be the more honest depiction, which is fine. I’m not sure that anybody other than people writing cop shows need them to show up at crime scenes and begin to grieve.
One of the most eye-opening aspects of the book is the sheer level of politics involved in police work; the fact that difficult cases might be pushed aside to maintain the clearance rate, or that even if the case does go to trial, the assistant state’s attorney – who also wants to maintain a high conviction rate – will be breathing down the detective’s neck every step of the way.
Well, statistics destroy anything, don’t they? We really played it up aggressively in The Wire, because in this country – I’m not sure about Ireland – anything that can be measured, is being measured. And not well. This is the theme in American life going back through the entire 20th century: the more analysis we do based on statistics, the better our institutions get at juking statistics, because promotional advancement and careers are all predicated on saying that today is better than yesterday.
Here’s how subtle and insidious it is. A draft report just got released in Baltimore this week by a non-profit foundation, which pointed out that juries in Baltimore City were much less likely to convict defendants than the surrounding counties. They were wondering sort of innocently, ‘Why is this? Is it race? Or what it is it?’ Well, the other thing that happened is that we had a mayor who wanted to get elected governor.
He needed to reduce the crime rate, and he couldn’t get a handle on it, so his police department, for about two or three years, began locking up people at a rate unheard of in the history of the city. So people were being dragged to central booking, and then pretty much released. There were these arrest quotas, and they would jack people up for, like, ‘Driving while black in the city’. The charges couldn’t be sustained.
So thousands were locked up, and very few of them were charged, but of course they went to jail for the night or whatever, and it became this source of contention between the community and the police. Well, here you are a few years later, and you can’t figure out why you can’t find 12 jurors to believe the police. So now you’ve got another statistical problem. Statistics are the great damnation of the 20th and 21st centuries. They’re killing us.
Prior to writing the book, you’d been a police reporter with The Baltimore Sun, so obviously you were familiar with that world to a certain extent. But would you say it took you a while to earn the trust of the detectives?
The truth is I didn’t need their trust. On some level, I was in. One of the things I learned before Homicide, when I was just doing straight reporting – although the book really made me completely aware of it, it became almost like a mantra – was, ‘It’s okay to be the fool.’ In fact, it’s pretty good if you have the opportunity to play the fool, in that Homicide was an exercise in making people comfortable, and nothing makes people comfortable like suggesting to them that you don’t understand anything, and you need their help. If the job description is, ‘Find out everything you can about something and report it’, it’s amazing how many reporters aren’t comfortable with the idea of looking foolish.
There used to be a great guy, a legend for the Herald Tribune in New York – which was a great writers’ paper from the ’40s to the ’60s – named Homer Bigart. He later went to the New York Times in the ’50s, and won a couple of Pulitzers. He was famous because he had this terrible stutter, and the speech impediment was so bad that he was a copy boy into his thirties. He finally begged his way to an assignment, and he turned it in and it was great. Then he turned in another one that was even better, and he was off and running. He would use the fact that he would stutter, and that people thought he was an idiot.
Bigart was covering business then, and one of the best stories told about him was that Punch Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, once met up with this CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The CEO said to him, ‘I can’t believe the idiot you sent to interview me about my industry.’ Sulzberger said, ‘What was his name?’ The CEO replied, ‘Bigart or something. The guy was a complete idiot, I had to explain everything to him.’ That is the essence of the job.
The spine of the book is the investigation into the murder of an eleven-year-old girl, Latonya Wallace. When you describe her dead body at the crime scene, it is deeply unsettling. Were you taken aback by the level of depravity?
I was. That was a pretty big moment. And the truth is I’d been out drinking the night before with a couple of detectives, and I had resolved to be a little late for roll call, which I was allowed to be (laughs), because I was covering a variety of things. I would be at different places at different times; sometimes I would go to roll call, sometimes I would go to court. You would often have to choose where you were going and who you were following, and I had resolved to get in by late morning. I got this call at home waking me up, saying, ‘Don’t even shower, just throw on some clothes and get down here.’ It was Donald Worden, who was one of the best detectives. This was early February, and by that point he was looking out for me.
He was basically saying, ‘Hey, you’re not going to want to miss this. This is why we’re here, this is what we do.’ Up until then it had been drug murders and domestics, basically adults. I remember walking into that alley, and being floored by the perfect evil of it. It was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe she’s dead, and who would do this?’ The veteran detectives were a little busy doing the crime scene – and it was raining, which was a terrible thing for the crime scene – but you looked at some of the younger cops, and they had the same look on their face, like, ‘This is something you don’t see all the time.’
When I think of “a year in the life” books, I think mostly of sports books, such as those written by John Feinsten, who would hang out with basketball coaches, golfers and so on. What books did you take as a model for Homicide?
The prototype for Homicide was a book called Ball Four by Jim Bouton. It’s an amazing book that probably has not penetrated Europe very much, because it’s about baseball. But Bouton was a pitcher who had thrown out his arm. He had a brief famous period when he was a fireballer. He threw the ball very fast; he was with the Yankees and went to the World Series. Then he tore up his arm, so he came back at the end of his career as a knuckleball pitcher. He’d throw very slow, but it moved a little bit. I guess in cricket it would be called a googly or whatever.
Anyway, he was clinging to the margins of professional baseball, and was on a team called the Seattle Pilots, which is no longer around. They were an expansion team back in 1969/’70. They were like a last-placed team, and there were a lot of characters on the team. And he just took notes; it was hang-around journalism. Then he and Leonard Schechter, the professional writer who collaborated with him, wrote this masterpiece. It’s not only about baseball, it’s about American culture. It is so of its time. You’ve got to remember that baseball was this kind of stodgy, hero-worshipping thing. But this is ’69-’70; the height of the Vietnam protests, guys want to wear their hair long but the team rules say you can’t. America was changing, and baseball wasn’t.
Bouton captured this moment in time brilliantly. I read that book when I was around 12, and got it out and re-read it before I started writing Homicide, because it really did have that sort of blunt, honest, day-by-day tone. It was the template for Homicide. It’s a very funny book; it has very ribald, locker room kind of humour.
I read a book earlier this year called Flat Earth News by an English investigative reporter called Nick Davies, and one of the central points was that the ongoing corporatisation of newspapers has resulted in fewer reporters writing more stories. Interestingly, this was also one of the main themes in season five of The Wire.
Flat Earth News has been recommended to me. I haven’t read it yet, but I thought I would actually bring it over. But yeah, The Baltimore Sun has been eviscerated. There is no paper that can play the role of watchdog in a functional and consistent way in Baltimore; it doesn’t exist anymore, and it had existed for the last 150 years. It’s really shocking. When I was there, there were 500 reporters and editors putting out a morning Sun, a competing evening Sun, and insert zone sections for all of the surrounding counties.
The zone sections are gone, the competing evening paper is gone, and they’re down to 220 reporters and editors. The city’s not smaller and the problems are not smaller. The other thing is that the veterans, the people they buy out, are the ones making more money, who put the paper in a position to provide more benefits and better pension plans. There are people making mistakes in the paper on a daily basis that the older reporters and editors would have caught.
Everybody’s 24 and they’re being edited by 27-year-olds. And I say that having done good work when I was a 24-year-old reporter, but it was because somebody who was 35 was looking over my copy.
Another point Nick Davies makes in Flat Earth News is that the network of journalism is also being destroyed; regional publications are being bought out too, meaning that the conveyor belt of stories to the national newspapers has been virtually erased.
It has been, and replacing it is not easy. A newspaper is its institutional memory, and The Baltimore Sun now has very little of it left. The other thing – and this may not be indicative of the journalism culture in Ireland or anywhere else – is that in America, the all-consuming obsession with the prize culture and the Pulitzers has dictated how newspapers used what resources they did have. They used it to build resumes and to make careers for select people, but not to cover their cities in detail. It’s been, ‘Find a project where we can convince a prize committee that we’re special.’
Often that meant reducing a very complex issue, and one that required a great deal of sophistication, into something very simple and outrageous. Find a simple outrage and report the hell out of it. The problem with that is that in the modern world, it’s not simple outrages that are killing us, it’s the complex problems. Nobody had the stomach or the resources or the patience to seriously examine the world. What they did have the stomach to do was to follow the formula of the prize culture, and you saw a reduction in the ambition.
You mention in the afterword of Homicide that the seed of The Wire was planted when you had lunch with one of the detectives in the book, Richard Garvey, and you realised that you both worked for institutions by whom you’d been betrayed.
Absolutely, Ed Burns had a great deal of trouble getting the Baltimore Police Department to embrace the kind of investigations he was bringing in. He was giving them a template for how to approach violent drug traffickers using prolonged investigations. It was allowing them to catch people who they were unable to catch otherwise, in a traditional homicide investigation. He wrote papers on it, and he tried to interest the bosses in it, but they had no incentive; it didn’t fit their statistical model. They’d rather leave those guys on the street. It was very frustrating for Ed, and eventually he was marginalised.
At The Sun, anything that was perceived as a critique of management – even if it was genuine, and done with the intent of making the paper better – made people insecure. They were remarkably insecure about their standing and their way of doing business. It wasn’t just me – I left among 40 or 50 talented people. And that was just buyout number three. I think they’re up to number eight now.
What Homicide was about was expertise and people who know their business, and ultimately they were not valued by their own police department.
You’ve said in an interview that Paths Of Glory was the filmic model you took for The Wire. A couple of years ago, I actually interviewed Stanley Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, who has a famous scene at the end of the movie in which she moves a group of French soldiers to tears with her singing. Apparently it’s Steven Spielberg’s favourite scene in any Kubrick film.
It’s my favourite moment in film. I may have to reassess it now that Spielberg says it’s his. What a sequence, it’s just incredible.
That’s an interesting comment about Spielberg. Do you feel he’s had a damaging effect on the culture?
No, I think he’s a fine filmmaker, and he’s done some remarkable work. And I don’t mean to be snarky about it. There’s a little part of me that is wondering aloud whether or not the lionising of the World War II culture, in things like Band Of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan – and particularly the timing of that – did not encourage us to take a militaristic stance with regard to Iraq, which has become one of the more disturbing tragedies in American history. That stuff all came out in the wake of 9/11, and I think the country’s been running an emotional temperature ever since. And understandably so. But it’s lead us to some very dark places.
And I worry about the message. There’s something about war and film in particular. You can set out to make a careful, deliberate piece, and you can say to yourself, ‘It’ll show some glory, but it’ll also show the horrors of war.’ You can tell yourself all kinds of mitigating facts about what you’re doing. I think the truth is it’s very hard to make an anti-war movie. War comes out come glorious, heroic and larger-than-life on the screen. Because it is larger-than-life in a way. And yet, it’s war, and it’s an incredibly destructive human act. That’s my only point of concern.
I couldn’t understand the acclaim Saving Private Ryan received. I thought that as a war film, it was vastly inferior to the likes of Paths Of Glory, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now.
I thought Full Metal Jacket was maybe one of the few anti-war films. I don’t even mean anti-war films – I don’t think art has to be dogmatic or political in that sense. It was one of the few films that didn’t glorify war. There’s something about war in the camera that is a little bit too symbiotic, with the exception of a handful of efforts. And it’s very powerful, and it’s part of the national psyche. I think there are a variety of reasons that we miscalculated so badly in Iraq, but some of it has to do with our national temperament, and how we see ourselves and our military history. I worry about it.
I thought a lot about this in the run-up to doing Generation Kill. And I can see that because the marines themselves are fascinating, funny and very human once you get to know them, it’s a constant battle between trying to be honest about what war is, and at the same time trying to tell a story about people. I’m not even suggesting that Generation Kill was entirely successful. I’m just saying that I would feel a little better if I thought that Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Hanks were thinking about it a lot. That’s probably the most I would wonder about it.
The novelistic style of The Wire is pretty unique, and I can’t think of any other series that tells stories with that kind of pace and tone. Were you, in fact, influenced by any other TV shows at all?
No, I’ve never been a fan of serialised television. I worked on Homicide and it was a way of learning the craft. I admired what we did; I thought that Tom and Barry had constructed a very smart episodic drama, that had a lot of really good storytelling in it. But it didn’t have appeal to me, for a variety of reasons. I was looking for something with a singular story, and really the models were novels.
Richard Price’s Clockers had more influence on me than any television show, in terms of the structure, and going back and forth between multiple points of view, from the cops to the street.
Some of the corner stories – particularly that of Dukie, who was set to follow in Bubbles’ footsteps and become a heroin addict – reminded me of Hubert Selby Jr.
That’s interesting. I’ve only read one book by him, but I enjoyed it immensely, I thought it was really well done. It was Last Exit To Brooklyn. Price always credits him as being a huge influence, so maybe his DNA is in there somewhere. I remember reading Clockers as a police reporter, and thinking, ‘Wow, this guy is the John Steinbeck of the urban drug epidemic. He’s caught stuff in here that I’ve known, and until I read this, I couldn’t have thought of how to do it.’ It was a real eye-opener for me.
What projects are you working on at the moment?
We’re trying to shoot a pilot called Treme, about New Orleans musicians after the storm, and about the city and its future. We’re prepping the pilot, and we’re getting ready to go into story meetings and write the rest of the season. Also, Ed Burns and I are working on a couple of movies, one of which is a crime story out of Baltimore. It’s the true story of one of the guys who was the inspiration for Omar.
You mentioned in one interview that you’d like to do a comedy film at some stage.
Listen, there are a couple of light comedies that I’d love to do. But nobody is exactly rushing to say, ‘Yeah, we need to give this guy money to film a comedy, cos he’s such a funny guy.’ It’s not as if we’re in demand for our comic skills!

Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets is out now, published by Canongate Books.