Word: copping
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...really know what The Wire is you have to know what the wire, lowercase, is. In the first season of the series, in 2002, the wire was a wiretap, which a team of Baltimore cops used in a season-long probe of a drug gang. At first blush, it sounded too conventional for the home of The Sopranos. A police drama on HBO? What's next? A sitcom about a friendly Martian? "We were the 'gritty cop show,'" David Simon, the former police reporter who created the series, recalls of some dismissive early reviews...
...gritty cop show revealed itself to be something much bigger. The first season humanized the drug soldiers without condoning them--following them home, speaking their language and showing how they were used as cannon fodder. And it showed how cops who want to do painstaking police work are frustrated by bosses who prefer cheap, fast street busts that boost arrest statistics but simply move the crime around. Each season afterward focused on another dimension of Baltimore life (see chart)--the working class, the politics, the schools--pulling back like a camera on a crane to show a complex ecosystem, with...
...Decades later, the stirred memory of that photo suggested the plot of Qiu's Red Mandarin Dress, the fifth and latest of his popular, Shanghai-set Inspector Chen detective novels. This time, Qiu's hero, a cop and poet, is on the trail of a serial killer who dresses his female victims in tailored qipao dresses - a macabre gesture freighted with political meaning. As in the previous books, the investigation leads Inspector Chen to a brutal legacy from the past, for even the most vicious of Qiu's criminals are victims of China's bloody history. So, incidentally, are many...
...Heroine, 2000) and human trafficking (A Loyal Character Dancer, 2002). Qiu's 2006 mystery, A Case of Two Cities, was a virtual blueprint for the pension scandal that roiled Shanghai's highest political aeries last year and led to the resignation of the city's Communist Party chief. "A cop walks around and knocks on people's doors, asks questions," Qiu says. "It's become a convenient way to write about things I want to explore...
...Perhaps reflecting his creator's donnish temperament, Inspector Chen is somewhat ambivalent about the door-knocking and petty politicking that go along with police work. In the course of his investigations, Qiu's hero frequently cites literary theory or quotes Tang dynasty poetry. Chen is less a cop moonlighting as a poet than a poet daylighting as a cop...