For the last three decades, novelist Richard Price has adapted the stories of many New York crimes into vivid narratives for best-selling books such as “Clockers” and “Freedomland,” along with screenplays for films such as “Sea of Love” and “Night and the City.” In an interview with the New York yesterday, the Bronx native spoke about the recent string of sensational crimes making headlines across the country, from a man alleged to have killed seven churchgoers and then himself in Wisconsin this weekend to the discovery of an alleged serial killer in Kansas to the disclosure that, among several others, two retired New York Police Department detectives have been charged with carrying out murders for the mob. One of those retired detectives, Louis Eppolito, played a part in a 1993 film for which Mr. Price wrote the screenplay, “Mad Dog and Glory.”

Q: What’s the effect of all these wild and sensational crimes on readers?

A: It makes you wonder: is this live, or is this Memorex? It makes you feel like you’re watching fictional TV. It numbs you up a bit, too, as if life were just a matter of channel-surfing between cop shows. It makes for the kind of journalism that says, “Stay tuned.”

Is this the kind of screen material that Hollywood producers are looking to groom into films?

No. These are the kinds of stories Hollywood avoids like the plague. Hollywood doesn’t like sadness or the cold hard life without tidy moral endings. Hollywood demands that the bad get punished and the good get rewarded. But life is more like that book that never got written – “When Good Things Happen to Bad People.”

In 1993, Mr. Eppolito appeared in “Mad Dog and Glory.” Was there any idea on the set that he might be affiliated with the mob?

Everything looked mobbed-up for that movie. It was a mobbed-up thing.

What do you think is interesting about the recent racketeering and murder charges against Mr. Eppolito and his partner in the police department, Stephen Caracappa?

Nothing really. There has been a history of the police in collusion with organized crime before the days of Tammany Hall. The story is kind of like, yeah, okay, it happened, it’s crazy, so what else is new?

What do you think makes some murders more interesting than others?

The things that interest me are the acts of violence that resonate to make a larger statement than the act itself. The kind of story that represents so many disparate parts of society coming together in one horrible encounter. Certain acts of violence bring together such a cross-section of people, as perps, as victims, as suspects, relatives, investigators, to create a microcosm, like a little chip of DNA that if blown up would replicate the world.

What’s in the DNA of two police officers charged with murdering for the mob while in uniform?

Other than the sensationalism, it reinforces our cynicism in how the world really works. When we look at a newspaper now, the assumption is that everybody, even the people in your building, are lying and hiding some horrible truth. We’ve come to believe that nobody’s clean and everybody is dirty. It’s just a matter of finding out in what ways particular people are particularly dirty.