Richard Price is sitting in the small, brightly lit kitchen of his Harlem brownstone, talking about The Night Of, his astonishingly successful and utterly addictive crime drama. “Yeah,” he says. “Everybody’s going crazy about it. My daughter was in a cab the other day and the driver told her that he and all the other Pakistani drivers at his garage take two hours off every Sunday: one hour to watch it, the other to discuss it.”

The Night Of, which is based on the 2008 British show Criminal Justice, is about to start on Sky Atlantic. In America, where the first series has just thundered to a close, everyone has a theory about wide-eyed Naz, played by Riz Ahmed, whose murder trial drives the action. Is he an innocent caught in the wrong place at the wrong time? A victim of Islamophobia? A wolf in sheep’s clothing? A violent killer? All of these things – or none?

There is, however, one thing Price would change about the show. “Way too many cats,” he says. “I hate cats. I’m allergic.” So why are they in there? Apparently, Steve Zaillian, the show’s Oscar winning co-creator, is to blame. “I also thought John Turturro’s character’s eczema was going to be a really small part of the show, but Zaillian said, ‘No, we’re going to make his feet really important.’”

This cosy kitchen seems a world away from the brutal crimes brought to life by Price. But upstairs, the walls tell a different story: on them hang a series of striking photographs by Weegee, the notorious New York ambulance-chaser of the 1930s and 40s who, like the laconic Price, made murder his business.

Price, now 66, was born into a working-class family in the Bronx. He made his name as the chronicler of “New York in the trenches”, finding success at 24 with his novel The Wanderers, a brutal coming-of-age drama about gang members in New York. “I look at it now and think, ‘There there, kid, calm down’,” he sniffs in his strong Bronx accent.

Price went on to write a further eight novels including Clockers, Freedomland and, most recently, police thriller The Whites. “When I wrote Clockers, it was after an eight-year hiatus. I was a different person. I’d kicked a drug habit, got married, started making solid money as a screenwriter and, most importantly, I had two children. As you get older you get wiser. Hopefully.”

He remains ambivalent about his screenwriting career, successful as it is. More than once he refers to it as “a job”. It’s clear novels are where his heart lies. Yet this is the man who wrote The Color of Money, Martin Scorsese’s celebrated 1986 drama about pool hustlers Tom Cruise and Paul Newman, as well as the Al Pacino thriller Sea of Love and numerous episodes of The Wire.

‘Everybody knows prisons are hellholes’ … Michael K Williams as inmate Freddy in The Night Of. Photograph: Craig Blankenhorn/HBO

“The Wire was easy to write for,” he says. “David Simon wore his crown very lightly.” Can he pick a favourite contribution? “I love the scene where Omar strides down the street in his pyjamas to get cereal and everyone starts throwing crack vials out the window. He comes home, puts the vials on the table, and his boyfriend says, ‘What – they don’t have the Honey Nut?’ I know how to make cops, street people and working-class people funny because humour comes out of recognition. But I don’t know how to make doctors or engineers funny. I’ve established my turf.”

Price has a reputation as the bard of the men in blue, a writer who understands life on the beat. How does he feel about deaths in police custody? “When Eric Garner happened, I talked to a lot of cops and they’d say, ‘Yeah, it’s fucked up.’ Or they go, ‘Oh well, there’s no excuse: sometimes the wrong people are hired.’ But police support police, so they’d hedge. Then the minute Dallas happened, it’s the great divide: us v them. Black Lives Matter has a tough row to hoe. People counter, ‘Well, all lives matter’ and it’s like, duh, that’s not the point. Black Lives Matter is about something specific: those deaths.”

The show has attracted some criticism for perceived inaccuracies in its legal scenes, as well as for its treatment of women. Price is fairly relaxed about the former. “Look, any finicky person of any profession represented in a film could probably pick it apart. Journalists could pick apart Spotlight. Just today, I got a call from a homicide cop who was going ballistic that the evidence should be in clear plastic bags. But it’s not a documentary. It’s more expedient for us to cheat a little.”

‘Men are leery of writing cliches about women’ … The Night Of has been criticised for failing its female characters like Andrea. Photograph: HBO

And does the show fail its female characters? Price initially responds by listing the women on the show, then catches himself: “The problem is that there is a preponderance of male writers and male creators in the industry. I also think men feel more comfortable writing about men because they’re very leery of writing cliches about women. It’s a defensive thing.”

He admits that he is uncomfortable about the opening episode’s graphic murder. “I think it’s a legit thing to criticise: once again, we have a victim who’s a girl and she’s an enigma not a real person. We inherited that from the British show and I’ll be honest – I didn’t see anything too wrong with it, but I did dislike the ghoulish mass of blood. I wanted a clean atrocity, very neat and surgical.”

Where the show works brilliantly is in its depiction of New York in all its bustling glory. The taut opening episode takes us from Naz’s family home in Jackson Heights, Queens, to the swanky home in Manhattan’s Upper West Side where troubled victim Andrea lives. In later episodes, we see the grotty court where Turturro, as down-on-his-luck lawyer John Stone, scrabbles for cases; and the brutal confines of the city’s infamous prison, Rikers Island. “Stories have to be written with a dry eye,” says Price. “You should not have heartstrings to tug. Sentimentality is like wearing galoshes when you should be wearing ballet slippers. It’s manipulation.”

Scrabbling for cases … John Turturro as down-on-his-luck lawyer John Stone. Photograph: HBO

The Night Of portrays a bleakly realistic world, with Naz’s case leading to Islamophobic incidents like the beating of a Pakistani cab driver – an event that found its own eerie echo in the recent murder of an Imam and his assistant in Queens. “We didn’t come at this with the idea of, ‘Oh, we’re going to expose social justice or the hellhole that is Rikers.’ Everybody knows it’s a hellhole. Prisons always are. We weren’t to know what would happen with Donald Trump – when we were first writing, who the hell was Trump? – or Eric Garner or Isis. It’s more that if you write stuff that reflects the vibrations in the air, some of it will make headlines. That makes you look like Nostradamus.”

With The Night Of now finished, he has moved on to his next TV project, reuniting with Simon on The Deuce, which stars James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Documenting the porn industry in 1970s Times Square, the show doesn’t exactly sound like a controversy-free ride. Price laughs. “The subject matter isn’t easy. Listen, we have abusive pimps, we have prostitutes. But if we were to whitewash that, then what’s the point? The bigger trick is how to portray the world of pornography without actually being titillating. David is so sensitive sometimes I wanna kill him. But if anyone can thread that needle, it’s him.”

• The Night Of starts on Sky Atlantic on 1 September at 9pm. The Whites is out now.