Richard Price writes cops, lawyers and dealers who sound overheard rather than written, because to a large degree they were. That ear gave television The Night Of and episodes of The Wire, and it is a better instrument than his plotting.
Fi1m perspective
John Stone wears sandals in a New York winter because his eczema will not tolerate shoes, and The Night Of (2016) gives the condition about as much screen time as the murder. That is Richard Price's habit in one detail. He is interested in the thing a character has stopped noticing about himself, and he will follow it down a corridor while the plot waits. The other habit is talk: cops, lawyers, dealers and taxi drivers who sound as though somebody sat at the next table and wrote down what they said. Price spends years on the ground before he types, and it shows.
He came to the screen from the novel and has never quite left it. The Wanderers (1974) was published when he was 24, and the books kept coming: Clockers (1992), Lush Life (2008), Lazarus Man (2025). In between he wrote The Colour of Money (1986) for Martin Scorsese, then spent the 2000s in David Simon's writers' room on The Wire (2002), where we could not tell you which lines are his, which is what a good room is for. The turn came with The Night Of, created with Steven Zaillian, and then The Deuce (2017), when he stopped contributing to programmes and started running them.
What works is the procedure. The Night Of follows one arrest through the New York courts as paperwork long before it becomes story, and the taxi garage and the evidence room get a care most crime writing skips. Its first hour held us as few things on television have: a college boy borrows his father's cab, a young woman gets in, he has not the heart to throw her out, and by morning she is dead and he has her blood on him. Nothing in it is showy. Every step is ordinary, which is why it frightens. Riz Ahmed and John Turturro do the best work in it, and Bill Camp's detective, troubled a little by the thought that he may be doing his job to the wrong man, is nearly their equal.
What does not work is familiar. The eight hours drift in the middle, some of the legal detail is there because the plot needs it rather than because a court would allow it, and the women are handled carelessly, a complaint that has followed his male-heavy rooms for a while. He has said, "I'm a novelist first, no matter how many screenplays I write," and the television bears him out in both directions. The patience and the ear are a novelist's. So is the reluctance to be hurried towards an ending.
Start with The Night Of. If eight hours on one arrest sounds slow, it is, and that is the recommendation.
Biography
Richard Price (born 12 October 1949) is an American novelist and screenwriter from New York City. He is the author of novels including The Wanderers (1974), Clockers (1992) and Lush Life (2008), which explore urban life in a realistic style.
Price has written screenplays for films such as The Color of Money (1986), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, Sea of Love (1989), Ransom (1996), Shaft (2000) and Child 44 (2015). He contributed episodes to the television series The Wire (2002–2008) and has worked on The Night Of (2016), The Deuce (2017) and The Outsider (2020). He created the series NYC 22 (2012).
