The Corner by David Simon & Ed Burns

The Wire TV series. Photo / Supplied

If you don't know your ground-stash from your re-up, or your crudball move from your everyday caper, you clearly haven't spent enough time hanging around the junkies and drug dealers who live and work in West Baltimore's crack markets.

While such first-person research could well get you tagged by a nine, David Simon and Ed Burns spent all of 1993 on those vial-strewn sidewalks and lived to tell the tale — and what a tale it is.

Burns, a former schoolteacher and detective, and Simon, a one-time Baltimore Sun crime reporter, are the same duo behind television's The Wire.

If you wondered how they made their dialogue, characters and street scenes so gritty, the answer lies within these 628 pages. The book is a re-issue, but a worthwhile one: this is a mammoth work of non-fiction written like a novel that takes readers to the cracked and broken front of the failed war on drugs.

The level of access the pair of authors gained into the lives of their subjects is incredible. From 14-year-old children candidly discussing gunplay and the art of drug-dealing, to likeable junkies who literally waste away despite earnest and honest attempts to change, Burns and Simon succeed in bringing to life a section of society often deemed dead.

There is considerable joy to be had in finding the inspiration behind characters from The Wire in these pages. Philosophising, good-natured junkie and freelance scrap-metal merchant Gary McCulloch is a dead-ringer for jovial addict Bubbles, and the schoolchildren struggling to find their way in an all-too-adult world clearly have inspiration in DeAndre, a 14-year-old father and part-time drug-dealer.

Heart-strings are pulled, and the scale of this work of non-fiction becomes apparent in the epilogue when the writers recount what happened to their characters in the decade following publication.

Many become victims of the drug trade, succumbing to prison, Aids or shootings. But there are tales of triumph: Fran Boyd, a strong-willed addict constantly trying to better herself, recently got married to Donnie Andrews, a reformed murderer who is cited as an inspiration for The Wire's Omar Little.

And Tyreeka, a 13-year-old who became pregnant during the course of the book, recently discovered that escaping the corners of the suburbs is not without hazard. One of the set texts she encounters in her first-year sociology course was none other than The Corner.

The Corner by David Simon & Ed Burns (Text Publishing $37)
Matt Nippert is an Auckland reviewer