Clockers

June 1, 1992
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.

March 1, 1992
"Strike" is his name, and he's a clocker--a crack dealer. Strike runs his own kingdom in urban New Jersey. When a seemingly ordinary, drug-related murder occurs on Strike's turf, veteran detective Rocco Klein, who's gone pretty much blase about his job, finds rejuvenation by attempting to prove that the confessed murderer--Strike's own brother--is innocent, and the guilty one is none other than Strike himself. By a widely acclaimed novelist and screenwriter (who's already sold the screen rights to this book for big bucks and has Martin Scorsese set to direct it), Price's latest novel is weighty in both senses of the word: poundage and effectiveness. So what's the point of all these so many pages? Two points. One, it's an incredible course in urban street life, particularly the crack culture, based on Price's own extensive research--years of hanging out with both cops and druggies. And, two, it gives witness to the timeless art of weaving a compelling narrative, no matter how raw the raw material. Many readers may proclaim this Price's best novel yet. ((Reviewed Mar. 1, 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)