Homicide: Life on the Street

Rick Fox at UNC

Rick Fox at UNC

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Based on David Simon's first book where he followed a group of Baltimore homicide detectives around for a year.

Truly one of the greatest books ever written about 20th century American cities.

The erudite Frank Pembleton character, played by the great Andre Braugher, is based on a real life detective (Harry Edgerton) who was detailed in the book.

He was also the inspiration for Lester Freamon in the Wire, and to some dgmegree McNulty.

No one in the squad doubted Edgerton’s abilities as an investigator and most would admit that, personally, they kind of liked the guy. But in a five-man unit where the detectives all worked one another’s cases and handled every kind of call, Harry Edgerton was something of a lone wolf, a man who regularly wandered off on his own extended adventures. In a unit where most murders were won or lost in the first twenty-four hours of investigation, Edgerton would pursue a case for days or even weeks, running down witnesses or conducting surveillance on a time clock all his own. Perennially late for roll calls and shift relief on nightwork, Edgerton might just as easily be discovered putting together a case file at 3: 00 A.M. when his shift had ended at midnight. For the most part, he worked his cases without a secondary detective, taking his own statements and conducting his own interrogations, oblivious of whatever storms were buffeting the rest of the squad. They regarded Edgerton as more of a finesse pitcher than a bullpen workhorse, and in an environment where quantity seemed to matter more than quality, his work ethic was a constant source of tension.
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Edgerton’s background only added to the isolation. The son of a respected New York jazz pianist, he was a child of Manhattan who joined the Baltimore department on a whim after glancing at an ad in the classifieds. Whereas many of those in homicide had spent their childhood on the same streets they were now policing, Edgerton’s frame of reference was Upper Manhattan, tinged with memories of visits to the Metropolitan Museum after school and nightclub engagements where his mother would accompany the likes of Lena Horne or Sammy Davis, Jr. His youth was as far removed from police work as a life could conceivably be: Edgerton could claim to have seen Dylan in the early Greenwich Village years, and he later sang lead for his own rock ’n’ roll group, an ensemble with the flower child name of Aphrodite.
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A conversation with Harry Edgerton was apt to wander from foreign art films to jazz fusion to the relative quality of imported Greek wines— an expertise acquired through his marriage into the Brooklyn family of a Greek merchant who had brought his family to New York after several successful years of trading in the Sudan. All of which made Harry Edgerton, even at the settled age of forty, an enigma to his colleagues. On midnight shift, when the rest of his squad might be sitting together, watching Clint Eastwood fondling the largest and most powerful handgun in the world, Edgerton could be found writing out an office report in the coffee room, listening to a tape of Emmylou Harris singing Woody Guthrie. And during the dinner hour, Edgerton was likely to disappear into the back of an East Baltimore Street carryout, where he would park in front of a bank of video games and lose himself in a fevered effort to blast apart multicolored space critters with a laser death ray.
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In an environment where a willingness to wear a pink necktie is held suspect, Edgerton was a certified flake. One of Jay Landsman’s throwaway lines pretty much summed things up for the entire unit: “For a communist, Harry’s a helluva detective.” And though Edgerton was black, his cosmopolitan background, his coffeehouse leanings, even his New York accent so completely confounded expectations that he was regarded as inauthentic by white detectives accustomed to viewing blacks through the limited prism of their own experience in the Baltimore slums. Edgerton crossed up stereotypes and blurred the unit’s preconceived racial lines: Even black detectives with local roots, like Eddie Brown, would routinely suggest that while Edgerton was black, he certainly wasn’t “po’ and black,” a distinction that Brown, who drove a Cadillac Brougham the size of a small container ship, reserved for himself. And on those occasions when white detectives needed someone to anonymously call some West Baltimore address to see if a wanted suspect happened to be at home, Edgerton would be quickly discouraged.
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Rick Fox at UNC

Rick Fox at UNC

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In a former life, I was studying for an economics Ph.D at a top research university. I can truly say that David Simon and a sociologist named Camilo Jose Vergara were almost solely responsible for my decision to do so.

I discovered that most academics are insufferable but an erudite journalist tends to be the real deal and Simon is just that.

During visits to Johns Hopkins or Georgetown, Simon's work had me driving around Baltimore at all hours taking photographs of the city. While visiting UChicago, I would drive to Gary and spend all day photographing its fading industrial core. Same with L.A., Tucson, Pennsylvania, and New York.

If you haven't had a chance to read the book, please do so. It captures a time when we still had belief in and reverence toward American institutions, especially at the municipal level. It's one of the most complete non-academic documents of a post-industrial city we have and to be fair, it's better than most academic treatments. While you're at it, read The Corner.

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Trips

Trips

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I think as soon as my horror challenge is over. I'm going to watch this as a bridge to my inevitable Wire rewatch that is due.
 
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