PLAYBOY: How do the cops relate to you?

PRICE: My work precedes me. They've seen Sea of Love or Clockers or The Wire or something. More often it's something they've seen than something they've read. Cops know that people are fascinated with what they do. But at the same time, how many individuals get approached by writers who say, "Look, I'm really curious about how you make it through your shift and what you do, what you think about?" It's intriguing to have somebody along who's your Boswell. You just try to be good company. And make sure all the rounds are on you.

PLAYBOY: You know your characters well. How do you do your research?

PRICE: Research is a high-sounding word for avoiding writing. Sometimes you don't even know what you don't know until you find out you don't know it. The more you hang out, the more you realize what you don't know. You don't even know what questions to ask until you spend time just hanging out. And then pertinent questions arise. But when I go out there, I don't have a list of questions. I just throw myself in and see where the day takes me. In the course of conversation, things will come up that when I left my house in the morning or in the evening, I had no idea I was even going to ask. You do that until you realize you're just fending off actual writing to the point where it becomes unbearable.

PRICE: What drew me down there was its history. The Lower East Side has gone through all these incarnations. For my family, like so many families, it's where you start out and you say, "go," and everybody starts leaping west and north and south and the whole point is to get as far away from there as possible. Now, the irony is that because of its latest real estate reincarnation, you have kids, like my kids, who are fifth-generation Lower East Siders. They're oblivious to that fact. They are down there partying and engaging in the cutting edge of whatever the culture is, only minimally aware that 100 yards away is where their family started out and it was not pretty. They were not going down to the Knitting Factory. They were not getting gelatos. They were not getting carded at the Pink Pony. They were killing each other.

PLAYBOY: How long did you work on Lush Life?

PRICE: The start is always an amorphous point. At first, I didn't realize I was working on a book. But I was down there scouting and sniffing around for a while before I had written a word. All of a sudden it dawns on me I've been working on something. But I would say maybe two and a half to three years. Of actual writing, maybe a year and a half to two years.

PLAYBOY: You do a fair amount of Hollywood work. Do you have to restrain yourself from making your novels too cinematic? How do you separate writing for film from writing novels?

PRICE: The problem isn't the screenplay getting into the book. That never happens. The problem is novelistic instincts getting into screenplays. By training and conditioning, I'm a novelist. So when I write screenplays, I tend to rely too heavily on dialogue because that's all I have. I'm not a visual artist. I'm not a director, and I'm certainly not a painter. All I have is words. So my screenplays tend to be word-heavy. Just because you have a great ear for dialogue doesn't make a good screenplay.

PLAYBOY: What was different for you on this book?

PRICE: I think as certain writers approach the last trimester of their writing life, there might be an impulse to pare down the writing. It's sort of like de-cluttering your house or traveling light because you're heading out. Lush Life might have been that. This book has been kind of pared down compared to some of the other things I've done.

PLAYBOY: We agree. It shows a real economy.

PRICE: It's hard to be sparse when all your impulses are toward photorealism and you want to put in everything but the kitchen sink -- especially when you're writing about the Lower East Side.