Edward Bunker

The Violent Reality of San Quentin

By the age of seventeen, Edward Bunker already knew what it was like to sleep in a San Quentin cell. He was no Hollywood postcard rebel without a cause but a real criminal who had racked up escapes and heists before he was old enough to vote.

He was the youngest inmate in the prison's history.

Inside, he realized the only way to avoid losing his mind was to write compulsively on an old typewriter. But he didn't write to redeem himself or to beg forgiveness from California society. He wrote because it was the one thing he did better than robbing banks or dealing drugs in the alleys of Los Angeles.

His teenage years were a parade of reform schools and juvenile detention centers. He spent much of his youth behind concrete walls, and that forged a dry literary style with no room for unnecessary embellishment. Because in prison, poetry won't save you from a knife in the back.

The Typewriter as a Firearm

His first novel took years to see the light of day because the prison system routinely confiscated his manuscripts. No Beast So Fierce came out in 1973 and blew crime literature apart from the inside. James Ellroy once said Bunker was the only author who really knew what he was writing about. And he was right.

In 1978, the film industry came knocking to adapt that literary debut. Dustin Hoffman starred in Parole, and Bunker himself supervised the screenplay so the grit of the original story wouldn't be lost. It was his official entry into the Hollywood unions while he was still under police supervision.

And the gamble paid off.

Bunker wasn't chasing fame, but the movies adopted him as a kind of talisman of authenticity. Directors sought him out so their dialogue wouldn't sound fake. So he began balancing his career as a novelist with brief appearances in front of the camera.

The Guy Who Didn't Tip

Quentin Tarantino brought him to a mainstream audience in 1992. He gave him the role of Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs and seated him at a table to debate Madonna songs and the ethics of tipping. He has barely any lines in the movie, but his physical presence gave the whole project credibility.

Tarantino wanted a real criminal on set so the young actors would know what real fear looks like. Bunker didn't need to act, because his face already told the West Coast criminal record. So he just showed up, cashed his check and spent a few weeks on set.

In 2000, actor Steve Buscemi directed Animal Factory, based on another of his prison novels. Bunker wrote the screenplay himself, and it captured the brutal hierarchy of modern prisons without falling into the cheap sentimentality of other commercial productions.

He died in Burbank on July 19, 2005, after vascular surgery that was complicated by his diabetes. He was seventy-one years old and left a healthy bank account thanks to the royalties from his eight published books.