An American Tragedy

By John Skow

TITLE: CLOCKERS

AUTHOR: RICHARD PRICE

PUBLISHER: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN; 599 PAGES; $22.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: A remarkable novel sketches broken lives in a drug zone.

You could call Clockers a detective story. There's a detective and there are bad guys, some of them detectives too, some not. There is also a crime that needs solving, which is a slight oddity in "Dempsy," a shabby, 24-hour-a-day nightworld located between Newark and Jersey City. Dempsy's crimes, mostly involving drugs, accumulate in the streets like garbage, but usually they don't require solving, just hosing away. There's nothing mysterious about what's going on.

But detective stories are escape fantasies. Clockers, one of the toughest and grittiest novels of the past few years, is no-exit reality. Richard Price, a film scriptwriter whose much praised first novel was The Wanderers, hung out with drug cops and drug dealers for two years, he says, listening to the talk and watching the action. A white, middle-class reader, from a neighborhood where people don't duck when they see a police car, has no business saying whether Price has got things right. But the book sounds right; it rings true. Cheap wine, the kind you drink on the front steps, is "stoop booze." That's information worth hanging out to hear. The plainclothes-police raiders who roust the drug dealers two or three times a night are "the Fury," from Plymouth Fury, the beat-up patrol car they drive. "Dicky check" -- genital search for drugs, done in the open and intended to humiliate -- is what the Fury imposes on the "clockers," the young black crack sellers who retail $10 bottles of crystallized cocaine at the edge of the Roosevelt projects. Why clockers? Don't explain too much; this isn't a National Geographic special; the author leaves the title's derivation hanging.

Ronald Dunham -- street name Strike -- is their foreman. Or scoutmaster, or baby-sitter; one of his clockers, Horace, 13, spends his time leafing wistfully through a catalog of kids' toys. Strike is only 19 himself, a scrawny fellow with a stutter and a bleeding ulcer that he treats with vanilla Yoo-Hoo. But he's smart; smart enough to know not to wear gold, not to trust anyone, not to get greedy and not to do product, because cocaine messes you up. He has $21,000 in cash stored around town, and he tells himself that this is his leaving-town fund.

Strike isn't going anywhere, however, unless down the drain is somewhere. He is sick with worry when Rodney, the fluky street lord who is his drug wholesaler, tells him that Darryl, another of his lieutenants, is cheating and must be killed -- "got to be got." Rodney seems to be saying Strike should do the job, and Strike is no shooter. Then Strike hears that Darryl has been shot and that Strike's brother Victor, a straight-arrow who works two jobs and has never had a parking ticket, has confessed. Rocco Klein, a white detective who's more honest than most, decides that Victor's confession is phony and that Strike, whom we know to be innocent, did the killing.

In a conventional cop opera, the puzzle -- Does Victor think he is protecting Strike, or did he somehow really shoot Darryl? -- would be the focus, and the detective would sort it out. Here, despite Rocco's efforts, nothing becomes clear, and Dempsy's new accumulations of refuse obscure last week's stains. Instead of a solution, Price leaves us with a sheaf of memorable sketches: Dempsy's citizens, peering at the streets from behind the broken panes of their lives. This is a superb reportorial novel, a fine job of writing and witnessing.