The US novelist and co-writer of The Wire on why his new book isn’t about cops and robbers, his 80s drug addiction and the authors who have inspired him

Richard Price, 75, is a screenwriter and author whose books include the 600-page drug-war epic Clockers (1992), which was filmed by Spike Lee and inspired the HBO crime drama The Wire, co-written by Price. Michael Chabon has called him “one of the best writers of dialogue in the history of American literature”. Born and raised in the Bronx, he lives in Harlem – the setting for his new novel, Lazarus Man, in which four strangers cross paths amid the collapse of a tenement block.

The book’s acknowledgments mention its “incredibly long gestation”...
I signed the contract to write this 17 years ago; if it was a baby, it’d now be applying to college. I’d just written Lush Life, a sort of panorama of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and I wanted to try to do the same for Harlem, but I’d only just moved there. New York City is 1,000 cities – move five blocks, you’re in a different one – so I had to live there a while to pick up the nuance. Plus, I was in a new relationship and it took about two years to calm down: it’s not just get up, write, sleep, get up, write, sleep, you know. And I needed dough – you can’t live on royalties from a novel – so I was doing TV serials. Also, honestly, I was intimidated: I’m a white writer in a time where people are very sensitive to who gets to write the stories of who. When I wrote Clockers, there wasn’t that policing of language; the whole world became hyperconscious, probably in a good way.