A tribute to Richard Belzer of ‘Homicide: Life on the Street’

Baltimore wears its weirdness, the grand and the shabby, on its star-spangled sleeve. We named a football team after a poem about a guy being haunted by a bird because its troubled creator died here. We obsess about crab seasoning. We know you don’t understand our accents, and we like it that way. In short, we’re the only kind of place that could have created a character as singularly and endearingly odd as Detective John Munch, played by comedian Richard Belzer, who died Sunday at age 78. For six years, he was the conspiracy theory-spouting soul of “Homicide: Life On The Street,” filmed in and around Baltimore and based on real-life Detective Jay Landsman from the David Simon book that inspired the series.