Richard Price talks about his latest 'Lush Life'

The novel “Lush Life” begins with the four members of the Quality of Life Task Force prowling the Lower East Side in a bogus taxi.

They stop a car, search it, find a small amount of drugs, and haul the driver to the police station. During questioning, it is implied that if the young man in custody leads them to where they can get a gun, he’ll be cut loose. Almost 400 pages later, readers discover the significance of these opening scenes.

Even though a rave review in The New York Times stated, “At its most basic level, ‘Lush Life’ is a police procedural, and it possesses all the gut-level suspense of a detective story,” Richard Price did not set out to write a simple tale of cops hunting a killer.

“I don’t see the police procedural element of the book,” said Mr. Price, who has a home in Amagansett. “I don’t really care that much about it. If you follow a police procedural, it’s like a great spine you can ride—it’s orderly, it’s chronological, and everything the characters do has a purpose, whether it’s an inept investigation or a very good one. I like to work in a more complex landscape. I don’t particularly care for genre writing.”

Reviewers have not pigeonholed the book as a crime story but as a complicated mainstream novel that is set on a changing Lower East Side and happens to include a murder. Readers know who did it by the first quarter of the book. The critical praise from such outlets as Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, and other publications have been perhaps the best of Mr. Price’s career as a novelist, which now encompasses 34 years.

The book also benefited from a big push by the publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux, and Mr. Price’s willingness to hit the road to promote it. He has recently returned from an 18-city tour. “Book tours are odd because at the beginning of the evening you have an audience and people are applauding and getting their books signed, then it’s 9:30 at night and you’re alone in a Radisson hotel room,” the author commented.

He was born in the northeast section of the Bronx and grew up in a housing project. This might not be what many would consider the most fertile ground for an aspiring writer, but after graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Mr. Price was accepted at Cornell University. After that he earned an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and did some graduate work at Stanford University. He was only 24 when his first novel, “The Wanderers,” a coming-of-age story set in the Bronx, was published.

He has no qualms about the early acclaim. “Once you’re published, the pressure is off,” Mr. Price said. “You’re not always questioning yourself, ‘Am I a writer? Should I go to law school?’”

“Lush Life” is his eighth novel. From the perspective of 34 years after his first one, he observed, “I look back and wonder why I don’t have 16 books. Eight books in 34 doesn’t seem like much of an output, especially now when I’m four or five years between books. However, this doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. There have been a couple of abandoned projects that I started writing before I was really grounded in the stories. I kept writing anyway, like buying a lottery ticket and hoping to win. There are a few trees I’d like to give back to the woods.”

Though most of the novels are not set in the Bronx, he can see that his childhood there had a strong influence on his writing and subject matter, which can involve gangs, racial conflict, and urban anxiety.

“I still feel a connection to the Bronx,” he said. “I feel like there is a housing project in everything I write and has been since my first book. It just happens that way, so obviously I keep being pulled back to where I came from.”

A breakthrough novel for Mr. Price was “Clockers,” published in 1992. It reached a wider audience than his previous four books and was made into a movie three years later, directed by Spike Lee. But by this point he already had a relationship with Hollywood, one that has strengthened in recent years.

A major boost was writing the screenplay for “The Color of Money,” the 1986 sequel to “The Hustler.” It was directed by Martin Scorcese; Mr. Price was nominated for an Academy Award, and Paul Newman was finally given a Best Actor Oscar. Other scripts have included “Sea of Love” with Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin, “Mad Dog and Glory” with Robert De Niro and Bill Murray, and the Mel Gibson thriller, “Ransom” directed by Ron Howard. (Coincidentally, the New York Times Book Review in 1981 titled a piece on Mr. Price “The Fonzie of Literature.”) His 1999 novel, “Freedomland,” was made into a feature film with Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore.

He is now working on three new screen projects. One is a pilot for a TV series on the FX cable network. The second is an adaptation of the just-published novel “Child 44,” which is to be directed by Ridley Scott. The third is for the producer Scott Rudin, who bought the dramatic rights to “Lush Life.” The latter script is by far the more difficult one.

“It’s very difficult for the novelist to disembowel his or her own book,” said the author. “It’s very hard to gain the objectivity that you need to tear everything up. It takes longer than if a screenwriter was adapting the book, because for me there is too much to let go of.”

Before “Lush Life” was published, Mr. Price was a writer on the HBO series “The Wire,” which ended its run this spring. He was not sorry to see it go.

“I think it’s great that ‘The Wire’ ended when it did,” he said. “It had its peak audience; it didn’t deteriorate. No one is ever going to say, ‘What happened to “The Wire,” it used to be so good.’ It’s like a great athlete who quits before he plays like a cripple.”

Some writers who switch from the page to the screen find it helpful to work in both mediums. Mr. Price is not one of them. “They hurt each other, writing novels and screenplays,” he stated. “What’s good for a screenplay is bad for a novel. A screenplay has to be very superficial, and what works for a novel makes for a bogged-down, wordy script. Movies are two-dimensional, all you do is observe the surface. There is no author, no narrator, no god with a screenplay. In a book you see things, hear things, there are the interior lives of the characters. The sentences count. In a script, the sentences are nothing more than set-ups for the action.”

For him, Amagansett is more than a retreat from his other home in Manhattan. “I can pretty much write anywhere, but I did get into the habit of going to Amagansett for a few days here and there in the winter,” Mr. Price said. “It helps that at that time of year there are no distractions from writing and my days here are especially productive. And there are no traffic jams.”