Clockers
Richard Price spent years walking with detectives and dealers in Jersey City housing projects to write Clockers, the 1992 novel that gave the modern crime genre much of its template. Strike Dunham is a nineteen-year-old corner-level dealer for a smarter, more dangerous cousin, ulcer-ridden, ambitious, and visibly wearing out. When his straight-arrow brother walks into a police station and confesses to a shooting Strike is sure he committed himself, homicide detective Rocco Klein refuses to take the easy clearance and starts working both brothers in alternating chapters. Price's prose is plainspoken, profane, and forensically observed, the dialogue tuned for the streets it came from. Spike Lee adapted it into the 1995 film, but the novel's interior monologues, on heroin sales, on tired marriages, on which fast food is cheapest, do work the movie cannot. A foundational text for The Wire and a generation of police procedurals.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Clockers
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In a Jersey City project, nineteen-year-old crack-cocaine clocker Strike spends nights on a bench while his older brother holds a steady job. A drug-related murder pulls a homicide detective into both their lives.
Yes. Spike Lee directed a 1995 film adaptation starring Mekhi Phifer, Harvey Keitel, and John Turturro. The film follows the novel closely and is widely regarded as one of Lee's strongest crime films.
Clockers is fictional but built from extensive reporting Richard Price did in Jersey City public housing. Price spent more than a year embedded with both drug dealers and homicide detectives before writing the novel.
Clockers was written by Richard Price, published in 1992 by Houghton Mifflin.
Clockers is 599 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Clockers takes most readers 9 to 13 hours to finish.
Clockers is a standalone novel by Richard Price, not part of a series.
Clockers is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.