Jay Landsman is a retired homicide detective and actor. He was featured in David Simon's book about the Baltimore homicide unit Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. According to the book, Landsman was the last of his family line on the Baltimore Police Department. His brother Jerry was a detective in the agency who left in the 1980s and their father was the department's first Jewish district commander.
| Jay Landsman | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Television actor |
The book was later developed into the television series Homicide: Life on the Street. He was the inspiration for the fictional character John Munch (also Jewish) on that show as well as a character named Jay Landsman on the television series The Wire, created by Simon. Landsman portrayed himself in a brief appearance on the HBO miniseries The Corner and, later, appeared in The Wire, playing the character of Lieutenant Dennis Mello. Most recently, he appeared in season five of the food and travel show No Reservations, when host Anthony Bourdain stopped in Baltimore on a tour of America's rust belt.
Famous quotes containing the words jay and/or landsman:
“Thank heaven for little girls!
For little girls get bigger every day.”
—Alan Jay Lerner (1918–1986)
“The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head—no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)