As much as I’ve anticipated and enjoyed crime films this year like Winter's Bone and The Killer Inside Me, without a doubt, the best thing I’ve experienced theatrically in 2010 has been Jacques Audiard’s Prophet about a very young half-Arab, half-Corsican man thrown to the wolves inside a French prison, (available on DVD August 3). Malik’s rapid and mandatory graduation from petty street punk to hardcore criminal just to survive is harrowing and is simultaneously triumphant and tragic, survival trumping (relative) innocence and idealism.
Recently I touched on literary reformed cons, and their flipside like Dave Zeltserman’s ‘man out of prison’ trilogy, but remembering Prophet has had me gnawing on the writings of Edward Bunker and his insider’s point of view of prison and low level criminal lives.
Like Malik, Bunker was, at one time, the youngest inmate at San Quentin State Prison and had been in and out of institutions all his life, serving time for armed robbery, forgery and drug dealing. He learned to write while in prison and when he was paroled for the last time in 1975, he had a blossoming literary and film career and didn’t have to return to his former criminal life. His book No Beast so Fierce was being adapted, with a screenplay by Bunker, (who also wrote the screenplay for Runaway Train), into the film Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman playing his fictional alter ego.
Edward wrote stories of ground level criminals and convicts, junkies and thieves both in and out of prison. His most autobiographical fiction was 1977’s The Animal Factory, about a young man sent to San Quentin and taken under wing by an older inmate. Bunker also wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation which was directed by his Reservoir Dogs co-star Steve Buscemi, (yep, the appropriately named auteur Saint Quentin Tarantino cast Bunker in a cameo role as jewel thief Mr. Blue—a double hat tip to Bunker’s novel Little Boy Blue and the film The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three based on the novel by John Godey—in his directorial debut. Bunker later returned the favor, titling his 1999 book Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade).
Bunker died in 2005 at the age of 71 having published a second memoir Education of a Felon. After his death, some previously unpublished works have surfaced like Stark and the short story Death of a Rat in Blood, Guts, & Whiskey. (Also look for Bunker’s cameo roles in sillier prison films like Tango & Cash, The Running Man and The Longest Yard.)
William Styron, who wrote a great biographical introduction to Edward’s Dog Eat Dog said, “Bunker has produced a series of tough, gritty, painstakingly crafted narratives that has revealed better than any contemporary novelist the anatomy of the criminal mind.”
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
