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Overview

Novelist and Academy Award–nominated screenwriter Richard Price's bestselling second novel offers "an unforgettable picture of inner-city decay and despair" (USA Today)

At once an intense mystery and a revealing study of two men, a veteran homicide detective and an innercity crack dealer, on opposite sides of an endless war. Clockers is "powerful . . . harrowing . . . remarkable" (The New York Times Book Review).

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More About This Book

Overview

Novelist and Academy Award–nominated screenwriter Richard Price's bestselling second novel offers "an unforgettable picture of inner-city decay and despair" (USA Today)

At once an intense mystery and a revealing study of two men, a veteran homicide detective and an innercity crack dealer, on opposite sides of an endless war. Clockers is "powerful . . . harrowing . . . remarkable" (The New York Times Book Review).

Editorial Reviews

Chicago Tribune
Page after page explodes with prose as vivid as kinetic art.
New York Daily News
Dazzling . . . An odyssey of cops, drugs, survival and power . . . a closely observed tour de force.
More Reviews (8) Fewer Reviews
New York Times Book Review
Powerful . . . Harrowing . . . Remarkable.
People
Price displays a near perfect ear for street language . . . He gets so deep under the skin of both the cops and the clockers that it's hard to believe he himself has never been either.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Triumphant . . . an astounding accomplishment.
Playboy
Price propels each scene with vivid dialogue that crackles with realism.
USA Today
An unforgettable picture of inner-city decay and despair.
Washington Post Book World
One hell of a book.
Publishers Weekly
Selling $10 bottles of cocaine to drive-by customers, clockers are at the low end of the drug-dealing chain. One step up is Strike Dunham, an ulcer-ridden, black 19-year-old who oversees his part of the operation from a bench in the housing projects of a New Jersey city called Dempsy--the bleak and confined world that screenwriter and novelist Price ( Sea of Love and The Wanderers, respectively) explores with consistent authority. The murder of another dealer in Strike's drug organization brings in middle-aged, almost burned-out homicide detective Rocco Klein, who doesn't believe it when Strike's brother Victor, a young man with a family, two jobs and a clean record, confesses to the crime. The shooter's identity and motive are the questions on which Price turns this thoroughgoing exploration of Dempsy's dark and gritty underside, a place marked by unceasing, often random, motion and by the steady closing in of horizons. At the same time, Price plumbs the remarkably parallel interior worlds of Rocco and Strike. Although neither the hard-drinking Rocco, with a wife and infant daughter, nor the solitary Strike, who downs bottle after bottle of vanilla Yoo-Hoo to soothe his stomach pain, has a drug habit, each is as addicted--Strike to power and status, Rocco to the unpredictability and risk of his job--as are the junkies both pursue. The vividly depicted Dempsy seems a Dantean hell, at once a place and a condition from which escape may be impossible. 100,000 first printing; first serial to Esquire; movie rights to Universal; author tour. (May)
Kirkus Reviews
Price (The Breaks, 1982, etc.) has spent the past ten years writing for Hollywood (Sea of Love, etc.)—but you wouldn't know it from the dense textures and supple dramatics of this epic slice of urban grit about frazzled drug-dealers and burnt-out cops. Of the many impeccably authentic urban types here, Price focuses on two: 20-ish "Strike" Dunham, black chief of a crew of crack-dealers ("clockers") in the dead-end burg of Dempsy, N.J., and 43-year-old white Dempsy homicide cop Rocco Klein. Each is suffering an identity crisis when a murder puts them on a collision course. Strike, in a constant panic from dealing with his homicidal boss, crack-kingpin Rodney Little, is considering changing jobs; Rocco, six months from retirement, is thinking that his life is a big zero—a nullity underlined by his humiliating antics to curry the favor of a film star who might portray him in a movie. Then someone guns down another of Little's henchmen, and—shocking both Strike and Rocco—Strike's solid-citizen older brother, Victor, confesses to the killing: "self-defense," he claims. Not so, thinks Rocco, who decides that Victor is covering for Strike and starts harassing the young dealer by framing him as a stoolie—certain death at Little's hands. Meanwhile, myriad subplots vivify Strike's and Rocco's worlds: Rocco initiates the film star into the horrors of jail-life; Strike apprentices a young boy into dealing; Rocco's baby girl disappears; Little's legendary hit man wastes away from AIDS; Strike nearly dies from a bleeding ulcer. Finally, Strike, with a vengeful Little literally steps behind, turns to Rocco for help—a move that allows both to find a kind ofhope and renewal. A vital and bold novel rich in unexpected pleasure, with Price generally avoiding melodrama, sentimentality, and stereotype to portray a harsh world with cleareyed compassion. (Film rights sold—for a highly touted million, including Price's screenplay.)

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780312426187
  • Publisher: Picador
  • Publication date: 3/4/2008
  • Pages: 624
  • Sales rank: 295,050
  • Product dimensions: 5.79 (w) x 7.83 (h) x 1.11 (d)

Meet the Author

Richard Price
Richard Price

Richard Price is the author of seven novels, including Lush Life, Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He wrote the screenplays for the films Sea of Love, Ransom, and The Color of Money, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best TV writing as a co-writer for the HBO series The Wire. Price was also awarded a Literature Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.

Biography

In a 1981 essay he wrote for The New York Times entitled "The Fonzie of Literature," Bronx-born Richard Price sums up the origin of his rep as a streetwise scribe:

"I doubt that if I had written about the suburbs I would have attracted nearly as much attention. I found most interviewers and reviewers more than willing to romanticize my background, to make it sound like I had come out of Hell's Kitchen or an Odyssey House. I spent three hours being interviewed by People magazine, insisting that I was not Piri Thomas or Claude Brown, I was a middle-class Jewish kid who went to three colleges. But when the issue hit the stands, the leadoff of the one-paragraph squib was, 'Richard Price comes from the slum-stricken streets and paved playgrounds of the Bronx.'"

So while he may not be the hardened thug that critics seem to want to believe he is, his string of bestselling novels and hit screenplays are filled with enough urban wit and grit to garner him commercial and critical—if not street—cred.

After graduating from Cornell in 1971, Price broke out of the Bronx with The Wanderers in 1974, when he was 24 and in the process of earning an M.F.A. from Columbia. A series of hard-boiled vignettes about a teenage gang coming up in the 1960s that Price scribbled in his spare time, the collection was whisked off to a literary agent by the head of Columbia's writing program, and Price's debut found a publisher. In 1979, Orion released a major motion picture based on the book. A sort of "anti-Grease," The Wanderers noticeably lacked the nostalgic bubblegum bounce of other coming-of-age novels and flicks of its day, and touched off Price's reputation for being unafraid to expose the dark side of Americana.

Two more acclaimed novels would follow—I>Bloodbrothers (1976) and Ladies' Man (1978)—but soon an out-of-control cocaine habit plunged Price into a creative and personal abyss. "I wasn't even that big of a doper," he recalled to Salon.com. "I was definitely bush league. But enough that it sort of preoccupied me for three years."

Hollywood proved to be the sunny savior Price needed to help him climb out of the funk. By the mid-'80s, he had become a top screenwriter with a roster of hits to his credit, including the The Color of Money (for which he was nominated for an Academy Award), Sea of Love, Ransom, and Mad Dog and Glory. "[Screenwriting] kept me in the writing game, and it also showed me I was able to write about things that were not connected to my autobiography," he told Salon.

In 1994, Price returned to fiction with the novel Clockers—a gritty depiction of crack trafficking in the fictional city of Dempsy, New Jersey, a Dantean hell of crime and urban blight. (Adapted into a film by Spike Lee, Clockers would earn Price another Academy Award nomination for screenwriting.) Since then, he has revisited Dempsy in blockbusters like Freedomland and Samaritan, garnering praise for his unblinkered view of inner-city life and his pitch-perfect ear for street talk. A writer's writer, Price counts among his many admirers such distinguished novelists as Russell Banks, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Elmore Leonard, and Stephen King. But in a 2003 interview, he confessed that the greatest validation he ever received came from his teenage daughter who read Samaritan and told him he was "really good!" Says Price, "Of course I want The New York Times to sing my praises, but she's my kid."

Good To Know

Price lives in New York City with his wife, downtown artist Judy Hudson, and their two daughters.

The inspiration for his novel Freedomland came from the infamous case of Susan Smith—a woman who admitted to murdering her own children after initially reporting a fictional carjacking.

A former cocaine addict, Price occasionally volunteers his time to speak about the dangers of drugs to high school students.

    1. Hometown:
      New York, New York
    1. Date of Birth:
      October 12, 1949
    2. Place of Birth:
      Bronx, New York
    1. Education:
      B.A., Cornell University, 1971; M.F.A., Columbia University

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Strike spotted her: baby fat, baby face, Shanelle or Shanette, fourteen years old maybe, standing there with that queasy smile, trying to work up the nerve. He looked away, seeing her two months from now, no more baby fat, stinky, just another pipehead. Her undisguised hunger turned his stomach, but it was a bad day on his stomach all around, starting with the dream about his mother last night, with her standing in the window looking at him, pulling the shades up and down, trying to signal him about something, then on to this morning, being made to wait for an hour in the municipal building before anyone bothered to tell him his probation officer was out sick, then Peanut this afternoon not respecting two-for-one hour, and now, right here, some skinny white motherfucker coming on to The Word, trying to buy bottles, The Word looking to Strike like, "What do I do?" Strike turned away, thinking, "You on you own, I told you that," his stomach glowing Re a coal, making him want to go into a crouch to ease the bum.

Strike was seated on the top slat of his bench, his customary perch, looming over a cluster of screaming kids, pregnant women and too many girls, drinking vanilla Yoo-Hoo to calm his gut, watching The Word try to think on his feet. The white guy, a scrawny redhead wearing plaster-caked dungarees and a black Anthrax T-shirt, looked too twitchy and scared to be a knocko, but you never knew. Knockos making street buys usually came in colors, or at least Italian trying to be Puerto Rican, but not piney-woods white, and they usually acted cool or sneaky, not jumpy. The guy was probably a customer for real, but it was The Word's call —on-the-job training.

The guy took out a twenty for two bottles. Strike watched The Word thinking, thinking, finally saying, "Go change it for singles," Strike shook his head: Marked bills, Jesus, they ain't gonna go to the trouble of using marked bills to make a case on a two-bottle buy from a fifteen-year-old boy. A kid getting busted for that would probably get revolved at Juvenile and be back at the benches before the dinner-bout lull was over, fight on time for the heavy night traffic when he was really needed.

The white guy nodded and loped away, looking for a minimart, the twenty-dollar bill sticking tip out of his fist like a flower. Nobody would take him off with Strike here on the bench Tolling the Yoo-Hoo bottle between his palms, but Strike knew that if he was to go take a leak, the guy would be lying in the grass with a crease in his hat. Rodney had said it: most niggers out here want all the money now. They kill the golden goose, the return customer, because they never see past the next two minutes. A bunch of sneaker dealers: get ten dollars, run out and buy a ten-dollar ring.

Like Peanut earlier in the day, trying to make a little extra selling bottles one for ten instead of two for ten during Happy Hour. On each clip he had been pulling in a hundred instead of fifty, then turning over forty and pocketing sixty, until some pipehead came up to Strike and said, "I thought it be HappyHour." Strike looked at Peanut now, sulking on the comer, demoted to raising up -looking out for the Fury — a fiat twenty-dollar gig, no bottles, no commission. Watching Peanut probe the raw bump on his cheekbone, Strike swung into his usual recitation: Sneaker dealers, pipeheads, juveniles. Stickup artists, girls, the Fury. You can't trust nobody, so keep your back to the wall and your eyes open — 24, 7, 365.

Strike scanned the canyon walls of the Roosevelt Houses. There were thirteen high rises, twelve hundred families over two square blocks, and the housing office gave the Fury access to any vacant apartment for surveillance, so Strike never knew when or where they might be scoping him out. The best he could do was to get somebody to spot them sneaking into a building from the rear, yell out "Five-oh" so nobody did anything stupid and then just wait for them to get bored and leave.

The Fury consisted of only a handful of cops, and they had half a dozen housing projects to cover so they couldn't hole up for more than an hour. But it was no secret that Andre the Giant had a surveillance apartment too: 3A in 14 Dumont, the apartment Housing couldn't rent out because six children and their grandmother had died in a fire there a year before. Andre was obsessed with the dope crew that worked the Dumont side of the projects, unlike the Fury, who liked hitting the Weehawken side, Strike's side. But Andre was a free-range knocko; he could Show UP anywhere, anytime, and he could see the benches just fine from Dumont

Strike's clockers got jumpy if they thought they were being watched. They'd start singing too laud, get into idiotic arguments, let go of the pent-up tension in a hundred dumb ways, becoming a danger both to themselves and to Strike. And then there were the girlfriends to worry about. They were the worst — flirting with other guys in front of their boyfriends, gassing up their heads, starting fights. To Strike, the girls were good for one thing only. The Fury were all male, so if a girl kept her mouth shut, acted like a lady, she could carry two clips down in her panties, another two up top, and the Fury couldn't do anything unless they pulled her into the precinct for a strip search. And it was a lot quicker to serve up bottles out of a bra than to have everybody...

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Sort by: Showing all of 4 Customer Reviews

  • Posted October 16, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    9781615526109 9780805080759 26359392726 26359887321 9780380726233

    Clockers

    I just finished this novel and I think that it is one of the greatest crime novels that I have ever read. This novel is actually more than a crime novel, while it has it's fair share of twists and turns, Clockers is an excellent character study of both a Homicide detective and a drug-dealer in North Jersey. I don't want to give away any of the plot, because you should just find out yourself and be instantly rewarded. Also, if you are a fan of the Wire, the greatest television show ever, you will enjoy this novel because not only is Richard Price a writer for the show, but many parts of the novel feel as if you are watching the Wire.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted December 5, 2009

    I Also Recommend:

    9780312428228

    Clockers by Richard Price a Remarkable Novel

    As he did in Lush Life, Richard Price creates an environment that teems with anger, frustration, love, fidelity, and overall a desire to understand how to survive. His characters are complex, flawed, and often surprising. In Clockers we are immersed in the seamy and deadly world of drug dealers in Dempsey, NJ. I felt like I could see, smell, taste the many locales. Most stunning is the rhythm of his dialogue and the feeling of eavesdropping on a conversation, not just reading about it. I recommend this book to everyone.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted July 20, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted December 13, 2009

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