Richard Price will visit Sacramento for the first time Thursday to speak at the Crest Theatre as part of the California Lectures series.

Let's hope he likes the city enough to include it in a novel someday, even if it's just a paragraph. No one captures the thrust of a place – the shops and bars, the people and cadences – the way Price does.

Price's success as novelist and screenwriter lies in an ability to encompass a world in a sentence or two. Cinematic even before they're adapted into movies ("Clockers"), Price's novels contain vivid, sometimes profane dialogue that moves the story along as swiftly as action scenes and offer multiple perspectives via characters who cross age and socioeconomic lines while traversing the same streets.

"I do a considerable amount of hanging out in the world that I'm writing about, and I'll spend time with people who sort of inspire certain characters," Price, 59, said by telephone from his home in Harlem. "But the bottom line is that every character is the author."

In "Lush Life," Price's acclaimed 2008 novel just out in paperback, Price gives voice to Matty, a middle-aged Irish American police detective; Eric, a Lower East Side hipster whose Jewish forebears crowded the same tenements where 24-year-old rich kids from Japan now sleep off the previous night's clubbing; and Tristan, an African American teenager from a nearby public housing complex who is unsettled by his role in the incident linking the three characters.

"You don't have to be a social worker or live in the projects" to write a character like Tristan, said Price, a Bronx native whose first novel, the coming-of-age tale "The Wanderers," was published in 1974. "You just have to feel it's a character you can get carried away by in an empathetic manner and sort of create. I'm not a cop, either, but if you spend enough time (around real-life counterparts to his characters), you get a sense of something of what makes certain people tick. (But) it's always the author."

Every novel takes about three years to write, starting with a year of observation, which might mean talking to cops and drug dealers as Price did in researching his watershed 1992 novel "Clockers," an exploration of the crack epidemic that became a 1995 Spike Lee film.

"I am kinda taking notes, and at some point a note becomes a sentence and then a sentence becomes a paragraph," Price said. "It's not like, 'OK, I am going to start the book. What happens that night, sometimes it comes out as prose. Other nights, it's wet-cocktail-napkin take-down – an overheard phrase or something."

Known for his ear for dialogue, Price drops nuggets like "tinned" (showing one's badge), "dolgier" (a do-anything soldier on a crime crew) into "Lush Life" without glorifying or condescending to characters who utter them. The book also is packed with telling details, such as a female detective's gushing about a male colleague's muscles – a one-of-the-boys display that ultimately says more about her discomfort in a man's world than her admiration for the guy.

"One of the things I love about his books is that there is this great balance between what is precise, specific and accurate and what is universally true," said Shelley Blanton-Stroud, who teaches writing at Sacramento State and will speak about Price's work Thursday at the Crest just before the author takes the stage. "He gets away with things that journalists probably cannot. He can manufacture details that tell the larger truth."

Sometimes such details get lost when his books are adapted to movies, Price acknowledges. But scripts pay more than novels.

"A book is three years of your life, and you are lucky if you get low six figures (as an advance)," Price said. "You make that in a month of three months doing a screenplay. … The difference is that the screenplay is not yours; somebody will usually come along and write on top of you, or you'll get fired, or they'll hire two other writers after you finished. So you got the money, but you have nothing to show for it in terms of writing."

He can't stand adapting his own novels, Price said, because he's too close to the material to know what to keep and what to chuck. But when A-list producer Scott Rudin ("No Country for Old Men") wants to acquire rights to "Lush Life" only if Price is attached as screenwriter, Price gets attached.

He would prefer to write original screenplays, as he did for the 1989 Al Pacino film "Sea of Love," but the big studios that once made those films now want the surer bets and bigger payoffs of comic-book franchises. "Lush Life" will be made by the smaller Miramax.

"There's always good movies being made, but it's harder to find them, and it's tough times for everybody," Price said. "Screenwriters have really got to hustle now, like never before."

When "The Wire" ended, so did Price's gig writing for the beloved HBO show. Price wrote six episodes of the Baltimore-set series, but his influence is all over the show's street-level look at the narcotics trade.

"(Series creator) David Simon said 'The Wire' was originally based on 'Clockers,' " Price said.

Now, having just moved to Harlem, he wants to set a novel there.

"(Harlem is) like this swirl of black tradition, nouveau black, white people like me, and younger white people – Europeans," Price said.  "It's like Harlem has become much more byzantine. The night (President) Obama won the election, I was out on the street, and it was thousands and thousands of people screaming their heads off. It was like the best place in the world.

"Every 10 feet, you're in old Harlem, then you're in rehabbed Harlem, now you're in danger-zone Harlem. It's like a million microclimates. There is nothing staid about it."

He doesn't know what the story will be yet. He's still soaking things up.

"I was like that on 'Lush Life,' " Price said. "Until I had a story, I was just writing everything down."

Call Bee movie critic Carla Meyer, (916) 321-1118.