3:AM Magazine

By Max Dunbar.

We can’t stop it.

Not with all the lawyers, guns and money in this world. Not with guilt or money or righteous indignation. Not with crime summits, or task forces, or committees. Not with policy decisions made in places that can’t be seen from the lost corner of Fayette and Monroe. No lasting victory in the war on drugs can be bought by doubling the number of prison beds. No peace can come from kingpin statutes and civil forfeiture laws and warrantless searches and whatever the hell else is about to be tossed into next year’s omnibus crime bill.

Down on Fayette Street, they know.

At some time in the late nineties an electioneering councilman held up a copy of David Simon and Ed Burns’ phenomenal book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood, and before the cameras declared his intention, if voted in, to ratchet up the drugs war and cleanse the dealers’ corners forever. It was pointed out to this candidate that the book was in fact a damning indictment of the war on drugs and of drug prohibition. The candidate admitted that he hadn’t actually read The Corner: nevertheless, he was the man for the job, ’and indeed,’ the authors write, ’he was twice elected mayor of Baltimore.’

In September 1992, a police reporter and an ex-homicide detective started hanging around the Franklin Square neighbourhood in West Baltimore. The methodology was ’best described as stand-around-and-watch journalism.’ What emerged five years later was indeed the most powerful argument in literature against the lunacy of prohibition; lunacy apparent on an hourly basis to users, dealers, doctors, counsellors, police: to everyone, apparently, except the politicians that continue to prosecute an unwinnable war.

Yet The Corner is so much more than sociology or argument and to read it as such would be, in Irvine Welsh’s phrase: ‘to rip some of the soul out of it and to make the characters into victims.’ Much of the time you’re not thinking about the ugly and stupid economic and political arrangements that condemn these people before they are born. You’re thinking: who is going to look after Tyreeka’s baby? Will Gary McCullough be able to hold down his job at the crab market? Is Fran Boyd going to make it past the one-month coke and dope free mark? The tension is stronger than thriller. And why shouldn’t it be. On the corner these are matters of life and death.

It’s the original and devastating insights into welfare, teenage pregnancy, regeneration and crime. It’s the way Simon and Burns manage to convey the sheer amount of life and love and history and tragedy and redemption in one tiny section of urban America - they have Faulkner’s ability to ’see the world in a grain of sand.’ It’s the compassion and depth and humanity with which they treat their subjects that makes any pretensions to objectivity seem laughable, and rightly so. It’s the prose. There may be better prose writers in America, but not many.

On finishing this book I felt as I’d felt when I finished Simon’s previous work, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, after piling through it in about a week, reading it in bed and while eating and in bars. I thought then: this is so good that it’s actually beyond the capabilities of any book reviewer. I feel the same about this one. At this moment, you’re wasting precious time reading this piece, time that could be spent walking to your nearest bookshop and buying this book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals including Open Wide, Straight from the Fridge and Lamport Court. He also writes articles on politics and religion for Butterflies and Wheels. He is Manchester’s regional editor of Succour magazine, a journal of new fiction and poetry. He is a co-editor of 3:AM and blogs here.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, April 29th, 2009.