It started as a cop show about drug gangs in Baltimore, and grew into an epic, shifting portrait of a city in the grip of poverty and crisis. But The Wire - now in its final season and acclaimed as the most accomplished TV series ever - is not the work of regular screen writers but an ex-journalist, an ex-detective and an elite team of novelists. We asked our own panel of crime writers to explain its appeal

Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh is a novelist, playwright and screenwriter acclaimed for his gritty depictions of Scottish working-class life. His novels include Trainspotting, Filth and Porno. His latest, Crime, is out now.

My pal and screenwriting partner Dean Cavanagh is the master of the download and he seems to get everything before everyone else. He was going on about The Wire a few years back. Now I think it's the best thing on TV. By far. Nothing's close to it. A lot of things interest me about the programme: the huge ensemble cast and the fact that there are no stars, the sheer honesty of the writing. It makes just about all of the writing on British TV look absolutely shit. It maddens me that BBC or ITV put out crap after crap after crap and they don't pick up something like this. We don't know what to do with quality. We wouldn't recognise it if it bit us in the arse. All of the HBO stuff shows up how poor and puerile we are, and how our TV people completely patronise the public. Guys in housing estates in Britain go crazy about The Sopranos but programmers assume they just want shit like The Bill. A real revolution in programming is required in British television.

It's significant that none of the writers on The Wire came up through TV and that quite a few are crime novelists. There's a big difference between a proper writer and someone who's learned how to write scripts. We've got a big culture now of screenwriting and telling people how to structure things. Anyone can learn to write a three-act script but what they don't tell people is how to tell stories. The guys on The Wire are proper storytellers.

Of course you get good novelists who can't do scripts. F Scott Fitzgerald was one of the great writers of all time but he couldn't cut it in Hollywood. He couldn't get down to the crass discipline of doing three-act structures and plot points and foreshadowing. I had dinner with David Simon [the show's creator] a few weeks back and I was asking him how they managed it. He's just so careful about selecting the writers. That's the most important thing to him. It's very, very hard to get a job writing on The Wire

Simon has created a whole alternative Baltimore in the show. If you take a train from New York to Washington DC, you pass through the city and you can see all these places. Large swathes of north Baltimore are [made up of] all these beautiful old Victorian small houses that are completely derelict and overrun. You can see the kids standing on the street corners. Basically the whole of north Baltimore and parts of the south are like a big empty derelict film set for The Wire. It's like an alternative universe, with the politics and the school boards, but it's very close to the reality of the city in many ways. They use great local actors too. The guy who plays Proposition Joe is a well-known theatre actor who trains all the young kids. The whole thing is very much a local industry.

I find the character of Omar particularly interesting. He's an outsider's outsider, this Robin Hood type of guy who steals from the drug lords as well as the police. He's an isolated figure, completely against everybody, and one of the few homosexual characters in the show, but he always seems to be one up. The guys in the police department and even the smooth characters like Proposition Joe are always a hop behind him.

Simon is normally very brutal about killing his darlings but Omar seems to have a different set of rules. Looking at the writing of The Wire, he's right out of kilter with the other characters. He is this hyper-real, fantastical character - a sort of mysterious phantom, almost super-powered - whereas the others are all very realist. If he were a realist character he would have been dead a long time ago. It's a tribute to the writing that this never hits a false register. It works as grammar, adding something rather than weakening the plausibility of the show.

My advice to anyone watching The Wire for the first time is to stick it out. The first two episodes in season one are actually pretty sketchy. They're a bit rough and ham-fisted, and it doesn't look as great as it actually becomes, but it kicks in around episode three, and when it starts to pull together it's really fantastic.

Michael Connelly

American writer Michael Connelly is the author of the acclaimed Harry Bosch series, about a Los Angeles detective. His next book, The Brass Verdict, is due in October.

If you look at The Wire in shorthand, it's a story about drug dealers and cops trying to catch them. That just doesn't sound interesting. But somehow they got inside these people and their neighbourhoods and the bureaucracies they work in to a unique degree. I have never seen anything like it on TV before. I've watched The Wire from the first night it aired, largely because I have a friend, George Pelecanos, who is a writer on the show. Also, David Simon [the show's creator] and I come from a similar background: we were both police reporters on a newspaper.

I've dabbled unsuccessfully with screenwriting - I had a TV show on the air eight years ago but it only lasted six episodes - so I know a little bit about it. I know in particular about the difficulty of moving from writing a book to a screenplay and how completely different they are. In a book you can explore what's going on in someone's head but you can never do that in a script. Instead you go for broad demonstrations of character, which often means that bad guys are all bad and good guys are all good. That's what you see most of the time in TV and movies but you don't see that in The Wire. The achievement of the series is that it has captured the humanity of every individual in it, whether they are a good person by trade or a bad person. In some cases it goes further by showing the nobility of the characters, be they drug dealers or even killers.

It's a fabulous accomplishment that the writers on the show, like Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane and Richard Price, have somehow been able to stay away from the stereotypical script. I had the opportunity to sit next to Simon at Lehane's wedding earlier this year and I asked him how they managed to do it so well. He said: 'It's my show but I trust these writers. I love their books. I love other scripts they've written. So I allow them to do their thing. I trust that they're good storytellers and they know what's important.' He provides the framework and the beat points - what has to happen in each episode - and he lets them wing it.

HBO deserves a lot of credit too. In the early years the ratings were pretty lean but the channel believed in the show and let Simon do his thing - pretty rare in TV, in America at least. They didn't have the ratings of The Sopranos. Maybe they could have had if they'd made the show more simplistic and focused on a core group of five or six mobsters, but this thing is all over the place. It's risky. I applaud that. I like to work for my entertainment. I like to put two and two together. I don't like to have everything handed to me on a plate.

There's a sub-theme in the final season about the declining newspaper business in the US that is so important and so accurate. I loved all the seasons but this one connected with me the most because that's where I came from, and because I also happen to be writing a novel about a newspaper reporter.

If you read a good book you get glued to your chair and have a visceral reaction to it. This was happening every week on The Wire. I'd say it's one of the five best shows I've ever seen.

John Williams

John Williams is best known for his Cardiff trilogy of thrillers, set in the city's criminal underworld. His most recent book is Temperance Town.



I didn't watch The Wire till around halfway through series two, delayed by the fact that I'm one of those people who steadfastly ignore things that everyone tells them will appeal to them ('snobs', I think, is the technical name). When I did succumb it took a little while to get my ear tuned in enough to start picking up the dialogue, but not much longer to realise that this was remarkable TV, a crime series that actually aspired to tell the truth about the way we live now rather than simply bamboozle us with an insanely complex whodunit or entertain us with 'ironic' brutality. And, to be honest, I was kind of annoyed.

Why annoyed? Because here was a TV show, a product of the most commercial industry you can imagine, and it was taking bigger risks than anything I'd lately encountered in the world of fiction, especially anything in crime fiction. That was saddening for me as I'd spent a fair bit of time over the past couple of decades championing crime fiction as the one art form that really tells it like it is.

Some time in the 1980s it struck me that mainstream contemporary fiction was doing a woeful job of reflecting what was going on in our modern-day cities. Meanwhile, in the world of crime fiction, writers like Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Sara Paretsky and the late, great George V Higgins were turning out books that married social realism to energetic storytelling. They, and others who followed in their footsteps, such as Walter Mosley and George Pelecanos, successfully conveyed the notion that out there on the streets was a world that Miss Marple and Hill Street Blues were never going to set right, a world that Amis and McEwan, or McInerney and Ellis, barely seemed to realise existed.

I was so enthused by this notion that I wrote a book called Into The Badlands in which I roamed America, talked to its great crime novelists, and fleshed out my case. And for the next decade or so I suppose I mostly still believed in it. But as I went on reviewing crime fiction in the Noughties, I felt an increasing sense of disappointment at the prevailing lack of ambition to do anything more than entertain. Everything people always used to say about crime fiction - isn't it just a formula? - seemed to be true. There was a plague of serial killers, pathologists and profilers, cops with bad marriages and drink problems. Lumbering plots with saccharine endings. I couldn't deny it any longer: the world of crime fiction had ceased to interest me.

Then I watched The Wire. And there was everything I'd liked in the work of Higgins or Leonard or Pelecanos: the inventive dialogue, the characters etched in shades of grey, the prevailing mood of moral ambiguity and profound cynicism as to the motives and efficacy of the forces of law and order. There, in particular, was the sustained attack on the war on drugs - a war that makes the Iraq adventure look well thought out - that neither our newspapers nor our novelists (with the shining exception of Richard Price) seemed able to make. There, in a nutshell, was the revival of American social realism: the Steinbeck/Hammett/Algren tradition that seemed to have been lost in a welter of postmodernism, post-colonialism and pure unadulterated schlock.

So I watched The Wire, and watched it some more, and nodded my head in respect as it widened its brief to take on education and politics, becoming positively Zola-esque in its detailing of the ways in which the rich and the powerful fail and exploit and madden the poor and the powerless and - in Baltimore at least - the black.

My one consolation, I suppose, in finding a TV series that is so much better than contemporary crime fiction is that much of the series is actually down to writers - not screenplay writers but book writers. Its progenitor, David Simon, made his name with a wonderful non-fiction account of policing in Baltimore called Homicide. And the show's regular writers include the aforementioned George Pelecanos and Richard Price, as well as Dennis Lehane.

Which is perhaps why, for me, The Wire is so satisfying. It's got all the advantages of a great series of crime novels, plus moving pictures - and for once there's no one telling the writer that it'll only sell if they stick a serial killer in the middle of it. So hurrah for smart literary TV; and boo to dumbed-down crime fiction.

John Harvey

John Harvey is the author of the Charlie Resnick novels, following the exploits of a Nottingham police officer, and has been awarded the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger award for a lifetime's contribution to crime writing. Cold in Hand is his most recent novel.



A little over a week before writing this, the same evening I read the news that another young Londoner had been killed - the 18th fatality on the streets so far this year - I watched Final Grades, the last episode of series four of The Wire.

For those of you who don't know, this series took public education as its theme; as well as showing the police continuing their struggle to hold the lid on mainly drug-fuelled crime, we follow a former police officer, now retrained, into one of the local schools for his first term of teaching.

Ed Burns, David Simon's principal co-writer on the series, had earlier followed the same course: police squad room to classroom. He knows.

Aside from how kids think and how they talk, how cops and teachers get through their day, Burns knows that in education, as in the justice system, it is all too often the system itself that is the biggest hindrance to achieving the kind of goals decency and common sense demand. One of the things The Wire is superb at - and which becomes possible because of its structure - is showing how politics and finance both underscore and overwhelm decisions taken on the ground.

An initiative to take those most likely to end up in a life of drugs and violence out of the normal classroom and educate them separately, in ways that try to give them an element of self-knowledge and pride, is stymied both by a lack of funding - itself due in no small part to political hubris and chicanery - and the necessity of forcing each pupil blindly through the rigidity of state testing.

I used the word 'kids' earlier, but that's not quite accurate. These are youths struggling, too soon, too close to the beginnings of their lives, to become adult, to become men; forced to do so by poverty and family breakdown, by peer group pressure, by the lack of opportunity and expectation.

What is so chilling, so heart-rending, about the young men whose short lives we follow in The Wire is that, despite their bombast and the brash fuck-you exterior they present to the world and largely to each other, in some ways they are still children. In brief moments, unguarded, you can see it in their eyes.

Talking to McNulty, the cop who has kept him out of prison, one of these kids says: 'I been out there since I was 13... This game is rigged... we're like the little bitches on the chessboard.'

'Pawns,' McNulty informs him. A scene or two later, the same kid is shot dead on his corner, a bullet to the head.

Of the vulnerable youths that the teachers and cops have made special efforts to save, one is sent to a group foster home where he's beaten up as a snitch, another - perhaps the sweetest of all, the one for whom you had the most hope - is back on the street again, dealing drugs. Even the bright youth who's been taken in by the ex-policeman and his wife has not lost his connection to the life.

Despite a few gestures towards closing on an upbeat note, this final episode of series four leaves you feeling shocked and forlorn, but caring. After getting to know these characters, week after week, even if you try not to, you care. Last night I watched a programme about the black power salutes at the 1968 Olympics: we wanted to draw attention, one of the athletes said, to the lives of black people in our country.

There's The Wire, holding up its fist. And casting a shadow now on this country, too.

Dreda Say Mitchell

Dreda Say Mitchell is best known for her novel Running Hot, a gangland thriller set in the East End, for which she was awarded a Crime Writers' Association Dagger Award in 2005. Her latest novel, Killer Tune, is out now.



From Dickens and Balzac to Z Cars and Lou Reed, portraying 'street life' has been a staple of drama, music and fiction, but it's not often that artists get it right. Most of us are wearily familiar with the pitfalls - the stereotyping, the authorial finger-wagging and the leaden political and social 'messages'. And they're often written by people whose only experience of the 'street' has been a few months slumming in a squat. The success of The Wire has been to transcend the usual format of social dramas to give us a panoramic view of modern urban America. It's all here - from the politicians in City Hall to the good cops who are really bad and the bad cops who are really good.

In season four it follows the experiences of four teenage boys. In a typical morality drama we would know what to expect: education will be a good thing, missing school will be a bad thing. And perhaps we can look out for an idealistic white teacher from the suburbs. But instead, in The Wire, we see the dynamics of the ghetto apply in the school system the same way they apply everywhere else, with the same devastating results. Meanwhile, up in City Hall, it's election time. Perhaps not: there are votes to be won, and it's not going to be pretty. The West Wing has its fans but if we really want to see the underbelly of American democracy, these episodes do it better.

British society has increasingly followed the US model and now we're confronting the same range of social problems. Many are looking to America to see what answers they've come up with. The narrative of The Wire suggests there aren't any. There may be solutions for individuals, occasionally, but there are no solutions for communities. If viewers want to see The Wire as a searing indictment of free market capitalism or the effects of liberal welfarism, they can, but the programme doesn't take a point of view. That's not to say, though, that it doesn't have a message, and it's that this kind of TV drama still works. When it's well written, well acted and portrays its characters without sentiment and without moralising, TV drama can still be a powerful artistic force.

Mark Billingham

Mark Billingham is the author of the Tom Thorne series, about a tormented DI in the Metropolitan Police. He won the 2003 Sherlock Award for Best UK detective novel for Scaredy Cat. His latest novel, In the Dark, is published next month.

To seek out novelists as members of a show's writing team is extremely rare but just such a forward-thinking policy - specifically the use of a triumvirate of America's finest urban crime novelists - has played a major part in making The Wire into the most acclaimed and groundbreaking TV drama in decades. George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane and Richard Price are the perfect writers for a show that is anything but a conventional crime series. As with their critically lauded novels, The Wire is able to deliver the genre goods while at the same time painting a deftly nuanced portrait of a city - in this case Baltimore - where the social fabric has been systematically degraded by those entrusted with its welfare.

With what David Simon has called a 'murderers' row' of writers on board, the show was further able to develop the novelistic approach which makes it so unique. With each episode a 'chapter' in a novel that lasts a season, The Wire makes no concessions to its viewers. This is not a show you can pick up halfway through.

Pelecanos, Lehane and Price each write with the precision that can only come from a novelist's research, and their work has an enviable economy. Theirs is fat-free storytelling, with each able to nail a character in a few key lines of razor-sharp dialogue without the need for back story or clumsy exposition. Though the plot moves along quickly enough to satisfy those used to less ambitious projects, the writers have been given the freedom to let themes and story-strands develop at their own pace. Characters are brought to life during seemingly innocuous conversations in bars or in police cruisers, each relationship as important as any other in a narrative arc that is not constricted by a ticking clock or the need for action sequences.

It remains to be seen if the righteous fury of The Wire's vision has been the wake-up call it should be, but at the very least those responsible for TV drama in Britain should take a hard look, and perhaps be a little braver.

· Season Five of The Wire begins on FX tomorrow at 10pm