There was no messing in the five novels of Nathan Heard, who has died aged 67. There were lines like "His hands gripped her shoulders like two steel traps," and as for the women, for Gypsy Pearl, faking delight in the act of mercantile passion, which opens his first novel Howard Street (1968), "the stink felt as stuck to her as a barrel of feathers poured over molasses".
But all this was not sprayed-on grotesquerie. The million-selling account of hoods, hoodlums, pimps and hookers sprang from close observation of the dirty side of Newark, New Jersey, the world into which Heard was born, and of Trenton state prison, where he served eight years for armed robbery.
Howard Street, his most enduring novel, prompted Henry Miller to say that he was an almost frightening writer, since his hatred and violence were so intense. The thoroughfare of the title is part of an area which had "the strange, but familiar and inevitable, combination of religion mixed in with every conceivable vice", and as for some of the other characters, they were "friends who enjoyed giving each other the pleasure of their bodies. It was like borrowing a neighbourly cup of sugar".
Howard Street has something of the quotability of Raymond Chandler, and, as with his novels, one reads it less for the plot - theft, murder, pursuit, revenge, and more deaths - than for such language as those lesbians so enthusiastic about their way of life that they are known as "studbroads".
It was his time in jail that led Heard to widen his tastes from baseball biographies. He browsed the pornography, took in Edgar Rice Burroughs, and, following a recommendation from another inmate, moved on to Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Norman Mailer and Richard Wright. Then he read everything he could get hold of - and concluded he could produce something better than the pulp fiction all around him. Howard Street was published a month before his release at Christmas 1968.
The son of a labourer and a blues singer, Heard's education was perfunctory. He dropped out of school in his mid-teens, and duly fetched up in reform school.
But, in 1969, Howard Street's success led to a teaching post at Fresno State College, California, where Heard's open approach to creative writing went down well - and students got a taste of what oppression could mean, when he was almost arrested for simply watching one of that era's demonstrations.
He was less happy with the black studies programme at Rutgers University, New Jersey, which he joined in 1970 and left after two years. He then took to film acting, singing and freelance journalism, writing about ghetto life. He also became a speech-writer for the mayor of Newark, Kenneth Gibson.
Heard continued to write fiction, returning to a first, unpublished novel for the melodramatic tale of a hustler waylaid by love in To Reach A Dream (1972). Far better was A Cold Fire Burning (1974) told in the first person by Shadow, who falls for Terri, an elegant, white social worker:
"We made love and talked through the haze of smoke, the glasses of wine, and the weird scent of sex in my room, which was lighted by the crimson glow of a lone red bulb. Somehow, I think that the bulb constituted the real meaning of our love for each other. Under that bulb in my two-room flat, she didn't seem quite so white, nor myself quite so black."
When Shadows Fall (1977) had a paciness which went some way to make up for the muddle and sensationalism of its account of drug-dealing. His last novel was House Of Slammers (1983), a fine bookend to that equally raw life out on Howard Street.
He is survived by a son and a daughter.
· Nathan Heard, writer, born November 7 1936; died March 14 2004
