Today’s best journalists are not journalists at all. They are old school novelists. Fiction, particularly crime fiction, remains one of the few spaces left for writers who want to capture the truth of the streets. It is also one of the few woke-free zones. Crime fiction, almost by necessity, approaches reality with much more clarity than the mainstream media.
For example, if you want to read a story that penetrates the issues plaguing America’s inner cities, from drug dealing to street crime, and does so in unforgettable ways without flinching in the face of urban black social dysfunction, read Clockers by Richard Price.
Clockers originally published in 1992, but recently reissued with a new introduction, is a standout example of the way fiction can sometimes bring readers more truth than a steady diet of newspapers. “When I am appointed czar of the high-school English curriculum,” Sam Sacks wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2024,
one of the contemporary works of fiction I will recommend for inclusion on the reading list will be Richard Price’s 1992 novel, Clockers. A savvy, detail-rich story that unforgettably humanizes its dueling main characters—a world-weary teenage drug dealer and a stubborn homicide detective—Clockers is a crime epic in the vein of Victor Hugo or Fyodor Dostoevsky.
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