The Ex-Con Novelist Who Played Mr. Blue In Reservoir Dogs

By his early teens, Bunker had spent half his life in foster homes. From the foster homes, he graduated to juvenile reform schools and from there finally to prison. The evolution of a criminal born and bred. Bunker earned the notorious honour of being the youngest inmate ever housed at the infamous San Quentin penitentiary in California. When he was just 17-years-old, Bunker found himself rocketing toward an early demise or serious prison time. Consorting with dope addicts, prostitutes, pimps and low-life thieves in the province of drugs, lust, and vice, he was heading down a bad path.

“He had a tumultuous home life,” Jedidiah Ayers, author of Peckerwood, tells me. “He was removed from and became a ward of the state, but he ran away from that environment and got involved in crime. Spent his teen years through his early thirties in and out of correctional facilities and mental hospitals. He used to pretend to be crazy, hoping to get lenient sentencing for his crimes.

It was in the hole at San Quentin where Bunker found the inspiration to become a writer. In a cell next to Caryl Chessman, who wrote Cell 2455 Death Row: A Condemned Man’s Own Story, Bunker found his calling. He was a criminal who wanted to be a writer. Now he just had to hone his chops. Bunker was no stranger to Hollywood either, growing up there mingling with the entertainment world’s elite.

“When he was in his teens, he had a benefactor of sorts, Louis Wallis, the wife of Hal Wallis, who produced Casablancaas well as all those schlocky Elvis movies,” says Chris Simunek, author of Paradise Burning: Adventures Of A High Times Journalist. “She gave him a typewriter and some books, and by the time he wrote his first novel, No Beast So Fierce, he had an incredible voice as a writer and intimate knowledge of a world that few outside prison were aware of.”

As a prison writer, I idolized Edward Bunker. He had written numerous books that I loved: Dog Eat DogLittle Boy BlueAnimal FactoryMiseducation of a Felon and the aforementioned No Beast So Fierce – adapted into the 1978 film, Straight Time, starring Dustin Hoffman. Just as Chessman was an inspiration for him, Bunker was an inspiration for me and one of the reasons I started writing while doing my time.

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