The Corner

"As you say, this is the book that led to The Wire , which David Simon created. The corner in the title is on West Fayette and North Monroe streets in West Baltimore. It’s an open-air drug market in a post-industrial landscape where the drug trade has taken over. The authors look at the area through the lives of the McCullough family – two drug-addict parents and their 15-year-old son DeAndre. David Simon was a crime reporter for The Baltimore Sun for many years and worked closely with Ed Burns, who was a homicide and narcotics cop before becoming a teacher. This book shows how the drug trade recruits children, which is also a theme of my book. They bring these children to life with strong characterisation and the human details of their stories. These are children that are lost in this secret, oppositional world of the inner-city drug trade. There are similarities between places like West Baltimore and inner cities in Britain. It’s a post-industrial landscape and there’s a “school of the street” or the “classroom of the corner” in both – it’s where many inner-city kids get their education and earn a living. In the UK the drug trade is worth about £4.5bn. It has a recruitment structure where primary school children who are excluded [from school] are drawn into selling drugs by “the olders”, as the older kids are called. The recruitment of young kids into shotting – street dealing – is all-pervasive now. You see it in The Corner , in The Wire , in Moss Side [in Manchester], Glasgow and London. I was out with the cops in Moss Side and we came across some gang members shortly after a kid was shot dead. I asked one of them why he was doing what he was doing and he said: “It’s all in the game. You’ve got to play or be played.” That’s actually a quote from the character Omar [Little] from The Wire , which shows its influence outside the United States. All the natural abilities and promise of these kids is just taken and plugged into the drug trade – that’s one of the saddest things. David Simon and Ed Burns capture the despair and hopelessness of these kids so well. The mafia is structured like a large corporate organisation in that it has its fingers in a lot of pies and runs a variety of business enterprises. The narcotics trade is a huge cash-based business and the money has to be laundered through these enterprises. There are certain businesses that lend themselves to cleaning large amounts of dirty money – nightclubs, lap dancing clubs – and that’s why the mafia sets them up. The larger gangs with about 200 members in Manchester have a hierarchical structure. At the top you have the generals, who command the three tiers below them. At the bottom you have boys as young as 10 or 11 who do the drudge work. So urban street gangs do have this slightly military structure. You can see that too in the language they use – they talk about “soldiers” and “the fallen”."

"I wanted to choose a book that showed slang on stage or, as one might say, “live”. The Corner is a view that you could only get through a great deal of patience and supreme reportorial skills. The authors spend a year with a family who use crack cocaine, and you watch the whole world of selling the drug. On one level it’s a soap opera – you could say it’s a crack soap opera. You become fond of the characters in it. You follow them. But it’s also a great tragedy, because no-one comes out happy. It’s full of slang. There are 350 different uses of slang in it, which is a lot for a single book and that makes it exciting to me. It’s also slang that I haven’t come across before in many cases, and it’s slang of a certain culture. As a slang lexicographer one is an appalling voyeur. And there’s no doubt that if you’re white, middle class and live in England, then reading The Corner is a very voyeuristic experience. I have varied opinions at different moments about how I feel towards the voyeuristic side of what I do, but The Corner is a fascinating book because of the language that is used. There is no artificiality, there is no putting slang in for its own sake. This is how the characters are speaking. Radically different no, different yes. Even within a city like London there are differences in slang words used in Tottenham and Brixton, so there are definitely going to be differences between Baltimore and, say, New York. I don’t like to say this in a way as a lexicographer, but there are limits and you chase slang as far and as fast as you can. But there’s a level of fine-tuning that you have to miss. There just isn’t the space, nor the time."