It is one of the many remarkable things about Edward Bunker that, having read his books (in particular No Beast So Fierce and Little Boy Blue) you feel like you know him. When I eventually met him - to interview him for Crime Time - I found him to be an easy going and likeable. It was a bit like talking to an uncle returned from the sea, full of strange and wonderful tales. This illusion lasted until, in the midst of one of his seemingly inexhaustible stories, he reached over, totally engrossed in the telling of his tale, and grabbed my upper arm. He has quite a grip and it gave me something of a jolt. I don't think he even realised he'd done it but he has a lot of power in those hands. Just for a moment I caught a glimpse of someone else, the Edward Bunker who's life story is told in these pages.
The first hundred pages of Little Boy Blue are, I would argue, his best writing. The first part of his memoirs details his early life and gives you some insight into why, 50 years on, he can make it all seem so real: "..the war the world declared on me when I was four years old". This was a young life punctuated by brutal and brutalising spells in places like the Pacific Colony State Hospital where he received a particularly savage beating ("This was a hospital. We were patients being cared for"). Read this and the corresponding section in Little Boy Blue and it's hard not to be moved. He was, quite literally, raised by the state (and sadly a lot of his experiences will have an oddly depressing reality for the Bunkers of today). By the time he was fourteen he was in Preston School of Industry by which time he was already reading voraciously and building a reputation as a "crazy" - a sure fire survival technique which, paradoxically, would get him into deeper and deeper trouble. At 17 years the Superintendent at Preston threatened to quit rather than have him back. He was sent to Lancaster (basically a prison) and, after a farcical knife fight he ended up in San Quentin. At 17 years he was the youngest inmate at the time. But Bunker is no apologist for himself. The choices he made were his. The State forced a set of circumstances on him and the dye was cast.
In one of the more remarkable parts of the book Bunker describes his growing relationship with Louise Wallis - a truly remarkable woman. One of the best scenes in the book is when they visit San Simeon, the legendary home of Randolph Hearst. Wallis planted the seeds of something bigger for Bunker than a life on the streets and it was Wallis who used her influence to save Bunker many times and, whilst he was in San Quentin, arranged for him to have a typewriter. Two key sections of the book recount Bunkers life in San Quentin and Folsom. He had started to write seriously but it was to be some time before No Beast So Fierce was to be published. Once on parole from San Quentin he was unlucky to get the parole officer from hell who managed to get him sent down again - basically because he didn't like Bunker's flash Jag (Louise Wallis also gave Bunker a life-long love of sports cars). If you have seen the film Straight Time you will remember what Dembo (the Bunker character played by Dustin Hoffman) does to Rosenthal/Lee Emmett Walsh on the freeway when he decides to go on the lam. Dembo puts it like this:
"I was going to war with society...I declared myself free from all rules accept those I wanted to accept - and I'd change those whenever I wanted. I'd be what I was with a vengeance: a criminal. My choice of crime and complete abandonment of society's strictures was also my truth...Crime was where I belonged, where I was comfortable and not torn apart inside. And though it was free choice it was also destiny. Society made me what I was(and ostracised me through fear of what it had created) and I gloried in what I was. If they refused to let me live in peace I didn't want to...at least I'd have the integrity of my own soul, being my own boss of my own little patch of hell..."
There's so much here at times Bunker's style slips. He is at his weakest describing the horrific circumstances in which race wars exploded in American prisons. This is partly because Bunker's telling of his life - this is how it was - limits his ability to make a sustained critical analysis. In this respect the two volumes he was proposing to write would have been better. I'm sure he would have had it in him but I suspect time was not on his side. Still, he knows how to write and to tell a good story. And there are more than a few laughs. A one point he describes Folsom's food as having Three Stars in Michelin Californian Prison Guide whilst commenting on the strange fact that whilst LA County Jail has the largest food bill of all Californian Prisons its food is virtually inedible.If you've read his books you'll love this. If you haven't you'll want to. You'll have to decide for yourself what to make of Mr Bunker. He sums it up like this: "..If God weighed all I have done against all that has been done to me in society's name, it would be a hard call which way the scales would tilt". For my money I'd forgive him anything for the books he's written.
