Simon's next book, The Corner, written with former policeman Ed Burns, was not about the police, who barely appear in its 535 pages. They are merely a fact of life, implacable, but curiously tangential to those who society regards as marginal. A companion piece to Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, it explored the lives of those who in the earlier book had been opaque, offering themselves up as subjects for investigation but not understanding. Now they take centre stage, dealing drugs on street corners, experiencing the reality of life in an inner city in freefall.

Simon and Burns provide a map that not merely locates the streets they had been observing but the addresses of those who feature first in their book and subsequently in the miniseries of the same name, as William Faulkner had offered a map of Yoknapatawpha County, except that that had been fictional, no matter how closely it corresponded to an actual Oxford, Mississippi. The map – an area ten blocks from downtown Baltimore and, at its heart, itself a mere ten blocks square – is a claim to truth, to a documentary accuracy. Within this grid pattern of streets, their subjects live their disconnected lives, surely as much characters, though, as those who inhabit any novel, in that Simon and Burns deal in more than mere recording. They go beyond an oral history, a charting of the geography of desire and despair, no matter their notebooks. These figures become exemplary, expressions of social process, but they also inhabit a drama shaped by those who observe.