Thursday, August 5, 2010

Richard Price...

...will become a crime novelist after all.

...there have been a lot of changes in Price's life since LUSH LIFE was published to near-universal acclaim in March 2008. He divorced his wife and is now living with the writer Lorraine Adams, who also writes literary fiction with crime elements. He left Gramercy Park and moved to Harlem. Screenplays he was contracted to write, such as an adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's novel CHILD 44, haven't panned out, at least publicly. And at 61, a certain cost-benefit analysis might kick in about whether it's economically worth it to spend 4-5 years researching and writing a big literary book with crime elements while writing screenplays that never get made (or don't end up paying the bills) or to produce a series of crime novels at a one-a-year pace, which it appears Price is on track to do.
It isn't just detective writers digging deeper, IOW. Crime and literary fiction are converging, with folks in both camps veering toward the other. Also in the same piece, the suprising suggestion that the two strongest influences upon "Benjamin Black" are Richard Stark and Georges Simenon. I should take another look.

2 comments:

Tulkinghorn said...

Still....

He's using a transparent pseudonym, presumably to avoid confusing the market while allowing himself to write different kinds of books.

Tricky business, that, since I doubt that some guy named Jay Morris, even if he wrote as well as Richard Price, could make much money as a first time crime novelist.

Confusing things even more: the material he's using is stuff already in draft for a Richard Price novel.

David Chute said...

He still has a few issues, in other words. Unlike Kate.