PRICE, Richard. Clockers. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015.

Octavo. Full deep brown leather. Spine with five raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt lettering and design to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 593 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

Richard Price (b. 1949) grew up in the Bronx, studied at Cornell and Columbia, and published his first novel, The Wanderers, in 1974 at the age of twenty-four. He has worked simultaneously as a novelist and screenwriter throughout his career — his scripts include The Color of Money (1986, Academy Award nomination), Sea of Love (1989), and Ransom (1996) — and his decade as a writer on The Wire, HBO's serial drama about drug trafficking and policing in Baltimore, brought his particular skills to the largest possible audience. He won the Edgar Award for Best TV Writing in 2007. The connection between The Wire and Clockers is not coincidental: the novel is widely credited as a major influence on the architecture of the series, and David Simon has acknowledged the debt explicitly.

Clockers was published in 1992 and remains Price's most substantial and most celebrated novel. It is set in a fictional New Jersey housing project called Dempsy — directly across the river from Manhattan and a world away — and follows two men on opposite sides of an unwinnable war. Strike Dunham is nineteen years old and runs a crew of street-corner cocaine dealers, the "clockers" of the title, from a bench outside a fast-food restaurant. He is smart, careful, and operating under relentless pressure from above and below: the dealer who supplies him demands results; the younger boys he supervises require management; and the police are a constant presence. Rocco Klein is a veteran homicide detective whose passion for the job has long since burned out into routine, until the morning after a shooting when a suspect walks in to confess — a suspect whose record and demeanour make Rocco almost immediately certain that he is innocent, and that Strike is the actual killer.

Price spent years researching the novel, accompanying detectives on their rounds and spending time in the housing projects his fiction depicts, and the result is a work of documentary precision embedded in a narrative of genuine power. The dialogue is exact — Price's ear for how people actually speak under pressure is the quality that has made him so valuable as a television writer — and the dual perspective, moving between Strike's calculation and Rocco's disillusionment, gives the novel a moral complexity that distinguishes it from crime fiction of a more conventional kind. Spike Lee's 1995 film adaptation brought the novel to a wider audience; The Wire made its influence permanent.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000544