Outside, Looking Back at the Underworld

Edward Bunker writes about the nether world of society’s outcasts with a passion and insight that comes from having lived life close to the bone.

Once branded an incorrigible three-time loser, he has written a jarring new novel, “Dog Eat Dog” (St. Martin’s), that exposes the flaws of California’s harsh “three strikes” law. As Bunker sees it, while the law may deter some crime, it will also cause murder.

Bunker, 60, has long had cult celebrity from three previous novels. Now, however, it appears from a growing crescendo of praise that “Dog Eat Dog” will admit him to the list of great writers whose talents were molded in the crucible of the cage: Socrates, Cervantes, DeSade, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Voltaire, to name but a handful.

Kirkus Review called it “a jolt of frozen adrenaline,” and trade bible Publishers Weekly gave it a coveted star. Said PW: “It is easy to see why Bunker, an ex-con, has such diverse admirers as Quentin Tarantino (who cast him as Mr. Blue in ‘Reservoir Dogs’), and William Styron (who contributes an introduction to this novel).”

Bunker is both awed and amused by the acclaim. He’s had good reviews before, though never like these. The day he left for a promotional tour of England, he said, “I wrote this book because this country knows it’s in trouble, but has no idea why or what to do about it.

“They plant the seed of crime, nurture the growing plant, then scream at the harvest. You cannot sow hemlock and expect to reap wheat.”

Bunker believes that we are what we have been taught to be.

“The demagogues are playing on fear,” he said, “and telling the lie that harsher laws and longer prison terms will make us safe. We already have a much, much greater percentage of our citizens serving much longer terms than any industrialized country. The only way we can have safety that way is with a neo-fascist police state.”

The three-strikes law is already costing lives, he believes, as those committing even minor crimes kill potential witnesses rather than risk that third conviction.

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Bunker has lived the subjects he writes about. I met him 25 years ago on Terminal Island, where I founded and taught the first creative writing class sanctioned by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. He was being held in the hole while awaiting trial on a Beverly Hills bank robbery.

Normally he would have been in Los Angeles County Jail, but the sheriff refused to board him because Bunker had written a searing article in The Times’ Sunday magazine in 1972. Called “The Inhuman Zoo,” it revealed the almost casual brutality inflicted by deputies.

Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess denounced the piece, saying Bunker had no credibility. Yet it is almost precisely what a blue ribbon committee detailed in a report two decades later.

The Times refused to retract Bunker’s allegations and Pitchess literally evicted Bunker from the county jail, forcing the U.S. Marshal’s office to hold him at Terminal Island during the trial.

It was during this period that we became friends. We shared aspirations to become writers, a considerably more improbable goal for him because he was still at war with the system and society.

Bunker was born in Hollywood on New Year’s Eve, 1935. His mother, a professional dancer who performed as a chorus girl in Busby Berkeley movies, left home and alcoholism drove his father, a studio grip, into a state hospital. At age 4, Bunker was placed in foster homes. He became a chronic runaway while developing an obstinate anti-authority streak.

“I didn’t hear about love except in movies when I was a kid,” he said.

At 11, Bunker entered his first reformatory, which he describes in “Dog Eat Dog” as “a hothouse for growing maniacs.” There he acquired the values of the criminal world, made friends with youths destined for lives of crime. He also rebelled against the authorities and escaped at every opportunity.

His rebellion and the state’s retaliation escalated until, at 16, he stabbed a guard. The wound was superficial, but he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and tried as an adult. At 17 he was sent to San Quentin, the youngest convict in that notorious “Bastille by the Bay.”

“Even in reform schools I had been a voracious reader,” Bunker said. “So I could escape to other worlds on the written word.” In San Quentin that reach began to assume depth and discretion.

“When I had been there a little over a year, Caryl Chessman [the infamous ‘Red Light Bandit’] published his book, ‘Cell 2455, Death Row.’ It was a revelation to me that a convict could write a book and have it published.”

It was the inspiration that made him commit himself to becoming a writer. His formal education had ended in the seventh grade. Yet, in the next 15 years, while serving time for a series of nonviolent crimes, he would write more than 100 stories and four full-length novels--teaching himself the craft of writing--before finding a publisher to accept his fifth, “No Beast So Fierce” (Norton, 1973). The book was in production when I met Bunker at Terminal Island.

After he was convicted of the bank robbery, prison officials believed Bunker’s track record made him an escape risk. He was sent to McNeil Island, the maximum security penitentiary near Seattle.

At that point I was writing and producing police dramas for television. CBS gave me a contract to write and produce a movie about Bunker’s life, then balked. It canceled the project after an administrative dispute that got Bunker transferred to the maximum of all maximum prisons, Marion, in Illinois. Inside an isolation cell there, Bunker had made it to the end of the line.

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Enter Dustin Hoffman. He had optioned “No Beast” for a feature film and, ever the perfectionist, wanted Bunker to co-write the script. I lobbied prison officials to return Bunker to Terminal Island, where he would be able to work with the Hollywood people who wanted to make the movie.

Bunker was sent back to TI and became an active member of the writers workshop, which also included such infamous aspiring wordsmiths as G. Gordon Liddy, Jeffrey MacDonald, Timothy Leary, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore. In 1974, Time magazine called it “the most successful program of its kind in U.S. penology.”

Bunker’s attitude and self-esteem changed as he met guest speakers from the worlds of literature, journalism and entertainment. Instead of relating to him as criminal and outcast, they saw him as a writer of promise.

“The parole board, however, saw it differently,” Bunker recalled. “They said I had gotten my break from the judge [who gave him less than the maximum sentence], and denied me parole.”

Hoffman had offered him an acting role in the movie. Bunker had already co-written the script, retitled “Straight Time,” with Alvin Sargent. Being made to serve his few remaining months would cost him the opportunity to work in a different world with new people.

I met with U.S. Chief Judge Manuel Real and asked if there was some way to allow Bunker to take advantage of Hoffman’s offer. A jurist who believes there is some good in every man, Real arranged a meeting with Judge Jesse Curtiss, Bunker’s sentencing judge. The process was complex, but Bunker was released. He had spent more than half his life behind bars.

“Prison officials said they’d keep a light in the window for me,” Bunker said with a chuckle.

That was in 1976.

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In the past two decades Bunker has been a model citizen.

“Part of this is due to my wife of 17 years, Jennifer” he said. “She has given me the first family I have ever known, and a handsome son, Brendan,” age 2 1/2.

He has continued to write. His second novel, “The Animal Factory,” was published in 1977. Although it sold poorly in the U.S., in England it was judged the eighth best book published that year. In 1982, he published “Little Boy Blue,” which again sold poorly in the States despite glowing reviews--but all his books continue to sell well in France and England.

In the years between “Little Boy Blue” and “Dog Eat Dog,” he has done rewrites on several movies, including “Runaway Train.” He has also worked as a technical advisor on movies about criminals and prisons and has appeared in enough of them to earn a Screen Actors Guild pension.

“Dog Eat Dog” transcends the crime-novel genre to comment on a violent society in slow disintegration.

Advocates of a harsher “three-strikes” law may choose not to read his book, but they will be unable to ignore it. After 40 years of toiling in the bottom lands of anonymity, Bunker is about to pass a milestone coveted by all authors: “Dog Eat Dog” has been picked as a trade paperback selection by the Book of the Month Club.