It was near midnight, and Richard Price was stranded, notebook in hand, in the lobby of a bleak housing project with a surly crowd massing outside. Price had followed a cop who was chasing a drug dealer into the building, only to have them vanish up one of three stairways before he could see where they went. When an elderly woman appeared, Price desperately bluffed being a cop and demanded, "Where'd my partner go?" She could only stammer and stare. Finally the real officer returned, winded and empty-handed, and escorted the shaken writer safely through the crowd.
That was just one of the scrapes Price survived while gathering material for his shattering novel Clockers, a 599-page panorama of crime-and-drug-infested streets that appeared in May to rave reviews and is now a best seller. To write it, Price spent three years hanging out in Jersey City with cops, cocaine dealers and seemingly everyone else in the meanest parts of town. At a time when the Los Angeles riots have shocked the country into a pained awareness of its troubled neighborhoods, Clockers illuminates the underside of one city with laser-like clarity.
The novel focuses on Strike, the black 19-year-old boss of a crew of teenage cocaine dealers, who suffers from a stammer and an ulcer; and Rocco Klein, the jaded white cop who investigates a murder to which Strike's brother Victor has confessed. "I'm not a social-policy maker, nor a journalist or sociologist," says Price, 42, an edgy, high-energy presence. "I want you to read about Strike and Victor and say, 'There but for the grace of God go I. And if I were born in the projects in 1970, where would I be today?' "
Price himself grew up in a lower-middle-class Jewish family in the projects in the era of black leather jackets and greaser hair. Today the kid from the Bronx is on a roll. Houghton Mifflin paid $500,000 for Clockers, and Universal Pictures is putting up $1.9 million for the film rights and a screenplay Price will write. Two more Price-scripted movies, Mad Dog and Glory and Night and the City, both starring Robert De Niro, are set for release this year. Earlier Price credits for The Color of Money and Sea of Love helped put him on Hollywood's A list. "He writes character first and then builds the story around the character," says Al Pacino, who starred in Sea of Love. "That's very good for an actor, because he supplies the character with so many levels."
Mean streets have fascinated Price since his days in the Bronx. He based his first novel, The Wanderers, a violence-laced cult classic about teen gangs that he wrote while a graduate student at Columbia, on the working-class kids he knew in the projects. Price drew on similar material for Bloodbrothers, another stunning tale of working-class Bronx brawlers. But he was never really part of the violence. "I was a member of the Goldberg gang -- we walked down the street doing algebra," he says in an interview in the lower-Manhattan loft he shares with his wife, the painter Judy Hudson, and daughters Annie, 7, and Gen, 5. "I just basically grew up on the periphery of things, and so by instinct I was an observer and a reviser of the world."