《The Rhetoric of The Wire》.pdfVIP

The Rhetoric of The Wire Building upon creator David Simon’s previous projects – ‘Mood and Feeling’. I will draw my examples principally his long books of investigative journalism, Homicide: A from the first three episodes of the first season. Year on the Killing Streets 1991 and with Ed Burns The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood Procedural Aspects 1997 , both of which later provided the basis for a televi- Eighteen minutes into ‘The Target’, the first episode of the sion series – The Wire HBO, 2002-8 is the product of series, Jimmy McNulty Dominic West , the closest thing years spent following and listening to Baltimore homicide the series has to a protagonist, arrives at a crime scene to detectives, patrol officers, drug addicts, dealers, city offi- meet his fellow homicide detective and working partner cials, and so on. In a retrospective chapter written for an Bunk Moreland Wendell Pierce . As the two stand over a edition of the Homicide book prompted by the success of dead body, McNulty lectures Bunk about having answered The Wire, Simon recalls reaching a stage in the research and the telephone call that brought him here when it was the writing process for that book where ‘notepads were stacked other homicide squad’s turn to do so. Bunk pleads for on my desk, a dog-eared tower of random detail that con- Jimmy’s help: ‘You gonna cut and run on the Bunk? That fused and intimidated me’ 2006: 625 . This is one side of shit ain’t right, Jimmy’. But McNulty is waiting for Bunk to the work of The Wire: a degree of research into its subject observe a detective’s ritual with which they are clearly both enviable by any standards. Another side is the transforma- familiar. ‘Say the words