David Simon–Homicide
September 20, 2008
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon
Simon’s genius in this formidable book (now published for the first time in the UK) is to avoid the detailed forensic description popularised by dramas such as CSI, showing us instead the human side of “murder police”.
Although the detectives featured in Homicide possess plenty of skill, it is their personalities that matter. There is the unit’s resident wizard, Donald Worden, a bearish man with a photographic memory, who Simon calls “the only surviving natural police detective in America”. During the course of the book’s year, Worden finds himself enmeshed in two politically fraught cases that bring him to the point of resignation, an event that would tear the unit apart. There is Terry McLarney, the clandestinely sophisticated squad sergeant who dresses as if he “wouldn’t come to work until the family dog had a chance to drag his shirt and sport coat across the front lawn”. And then there is Jay Landsman, the wisecracking sergeant whose practical jokes and vulgar witticisms mask an acute mind. (Fans of The Wire will recognise Landsman, as they will a number of other characters who are resurrected for the show.)
Although Homicide is perforce filled with harrowing detail, most notably an autopsy performed on a two-year-old, it also possesses a deep vein of dark comedy. Led by Landsman, the detectives deploy a gallows humor that has them batting one-liners back and forth like a group of seasoned vaudevillians. As Simon reminds us, “nothing in the world can come between a cop and his attitude”.
In one hilarious episode, cops rig a Xerox machine to spit out pages that read “truth” or “lie”, then convince a none-too-bright suspect that it’s a state-of-the-art polygraph. When he denies committing murder, they have it print out “lie”, whereupon the cowed defendant confesses. Another detective, expert at throwing his voice, delights in scaring newcomers to the coroner’s office by having corpses complain that they are cold, thereby giving a new twist to the homicide detective’s motto “we speak for the dead”.
And then there’s the case of Miss Geraldine Parrish, aka the Black Widow, a part-time voodoo priestess who is systematically killing off family members to collect their insurance. “As far as [detectives] can tell, the woman is married to five men simultaneously, two of whom were living with her…each believing the other is nothing more than a tenant at the East Baltimore home. Each is confident of his own place in the household. Each has signed a life insurance policy that names Geraldine Parrish as the beneficiary.”
Of course, it is not all fun and games for the murder police, and Simon proves capable of balancing humour with an equally gripping pathos, as in the case of Gene Cassidy, a promising young cop who is blinded in a senseless shooting. And then there is the detective who quickly adjusts the clothing of a murdered woman moments before her distraught husband rushes into the room. No case is more affecting, however, than that of 11-year-old LaTonya Wallace, found strangled and eviscerated in a dark alley after being abducted on her way home from the library. Although the investigation of her death starts in a glare of publicity, it gradually falls upon the shoulders of one beleaguered detective, Tom Pellegrini, to carry the burden as the case grows colder – and his own health suffers.
The true genius of all of Simon’s work is its scope. Just as The Wire encompasses an entire city by focusing on the work of one bedraggled police unit, so 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.
Homicide by David Simon
Canongate.12.99. 646pp
Andre Dubus III
September 20, 2008
The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III
The scenario clearly intrigues Andre Dubus III, who uses it as the basis for his powerful new novel. Dubus, the author of the critically acclaimed House of Sand and Fog, sets his action almost entirely over the course of one endless night during the week before the attacks. The action centres around the Puma Club, a strip joint in a backwater of the Florida coast. It is the workplace of April Connors, an enterprising young dancer who performs under the name of Spring. It is also the haunt of AJ Carey, a down-and-out construction worker, who spends money he can’t afford on a stripper named Marianne, his dreams of a happy life with her outside the club clearly about to turn into a nightmare. An even more ominous patron is Bassam, a dour young Saudi jihadist who has been studying at a nearby flight school and flashes a roll of $100 bills that he will soon no longer need.
Matters come to a head when April has to bring her three-year-old daughter Franny to work after being let down by a baby-sitter. Through a terrifyingly plausible sequence of misunderstandings, the child winds up in the custody of AJ while her mother is involved in a private performance for Bassam. Police are summoned, and for a tantalising few moments Bassam is taken into custody in the frenzied hunt for the child, potentially averting the attack to come. But the search soon turns elsewhere, since this is still a time when American tragedies were small, and the enemy seemed local.
Dubus’s novel is at its best as it focuses on the sordid but compelling drama that plays out between AJ and April, two people who meet briefly in the stylised choreography of a lap dance. Dubus wisely avoids any temptation to sentimentalise April, whose protestations that she strips only to support her daughter ring hollow when she is challenged by, of all people, Bassam. Like everyone else at the Puma, she is caught up in a whirlpool of ready money and sex.
With AJ, meanwhile, Dubus has created a character who possesses such epic self-delusional faculties that you cannot help but be mesmerised by his every step. His dusk-to-dawn odyssey as he tries to win the heart of a stripper, make peace with his estranged wife and “save” a stranger’s lost child is a masterful depiction of ruined manhood struggling to keep from sinking into the rubbish heap of American society.
The author’s efforts to capture the soul of his Muslim extremist prove less successful. There is no doubting he has done his research while creating Bassam, but the would-be hijacker remains an elusive character, who only really comes to life during a creepy intimate moment when he offers April hundreds of dollars to let him touch her caesarean scar. This is due primarily to the “close third-person” narrative voice Dubus uses while describing his actions, which strives for authenticity but comes across as stilted: “The dancing woman on the stage wears nothing but the hat of cowboys.” Too often, the language has the doctrinaire tone of a pronouncement slipped to Al-Jazeera for broadcast, leaving us to wonder what this troubled young man is really thinking after the prayers and propaganda grow silent.
That said, The Garden of Last Days remains a compelling portrait of a group of dead-enders brought together by a profound desperation that easy money, abundant flesh and blind violence cannot assuage. For all the contact and exposure that takes place in the pulsating light of the Puma Club, it is a place where people stay absolute mysteries to one another.
The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III
Heinemann £17.99 pp544
