Edward Bunker - Stark

Praise for Edward Bunker

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Edward Bunker is among the tiny band of American prisoner-writers whose work possesses integrity, craftsmanship, and moral passion an artist with a unique and compelling voice.

William Styron

Its easy to see why Bunker has acquired such diverse admirers as Quentin Tarantino and William Styron What distinguishes Bunker from other crime writers is his ability to convey the compassion dormant within his violent criminals without resorting to excess luridness, sympathy, or moralism.

Publishers Weekly

Edward Bunker writes about the netherworld of societys outcasts with a passion and insight that comes from having lived life close to the bone.

Los Angeles Times

Bunker shoots straighthis direct and transparent prose captures the primacy of violence that defines life in the slammer.

Kirkus Reviews

Edward Bunker is a true original of American letters. His books are criminal classics: novels about criminals, written by an ex-criminal, from the unregenerately criminal view point.

James Ellroy

The most compelling quality of No Beast So Fierce is that, solidly rooted in his own experiences, it explores the nature of the criminal mind with almost blinding authenticity. Bunker is obviously a man of unusual gifts honed under circumstances that would destroy most men.

Los Angeles Times

Quite simply, one of the great crime novels of the past thirty years.

James Ellroy

Hard as nails.

Loaded magazine (UK)

The best first-person crime novel I have ever read.

Quentin Tarantino

[No Beast So Fierce] is a gripping and harrowing read.

Daily Mail (UK)

The Animal Factory joins Solzhenitsyns One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and George Jacksons Soledad Brother in the front rank of prison literaturea stone classic.

Time Out

[Little Boy Blue] is a scalding experienceand a literary triumph in the tradition of Dreiser, Farrell, and James Jones. This is an important book.

Roderick Thorp

[Dog Eat Dog] is the angel dust of crime fiction: thrillingly violent and addictive, surging with exhilaration and fear.

The Evening Standard (UK)

Mr. Bunker has written a raw, unromantic, naturalistic crime drama more lurid than anything the noiresque Chandlers or Hammetts ever dreamed up.

The New York Times

At forty, Eddie Bunker was a hardened criminal with a substantial prison record. Twenty-five years later, he was hailed by his peers as Americas greatest living crime writer.

The Independent (UK)

[Mr. Blue] is a compulsively readable piece of real-life southern Californian noir.

The Saturday Times

A classic of criminal pride and indignation.

The Times

Bunker writes in straight-ahead, unadorned prose and, refreshingly, he refrains from excessive psychologizing and sentimentalizing a rough-hewn memoir by a rough-hewn man.

The New York Times Book Review

Also by Edward Bunker

The Animal Factory

Education of a Felon (published in the UK as Mr. Blue)

No Beast So Fierce

Dog Eat Dog

Little Boy Blue

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Eward Bunker

Foreword by James Ellroy

Afterword by Jennifer Steele

St. Martins Minotaur New York

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

STARK. Copyright 2007 by Brendan W. Bunker. Foreword 2007 by James Ellroy. Afterword 2007 by Jennifer Steele. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bunker, Edward, 1933-2005.

Stark / Edward Bunker. 1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37494-5

ISBN-10: 0-312-37494-1

1. Swindlers and swindlingFiction. 2. Nineteen sixtiesFiction. 3. CaliforniaFiction. I. Title.

PS3552.U47 S73 2008

813.54dc22

2007038729

First published in the UK by No Exit Press

First U.S. Edition: January 2008

10 9 8 7 6 54 3 2 1

For
Brendan Bunker

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Edward Bunker wrote journalistic pieces, short fiction and novels in and out of prison. His first efforts are reform-school newsletter entries circa 1950. Those pieces cannot be found today. Several early novel manuscripts written during Mr. Bunkers San Quentin jolts cannot be found. The short novel, Stark, apparently of late-60s/early-70s vintage, was discovered after Mr. Bunkers 2005 death.

Its thus a period book within a period book. Set in the early 60s in a Southern California beach town, its a wiiiiiild hybrid of 50s paperback-original pulp/noir and punks fantasy. Its a prophecy of the fine writer Mr. Bunker would become.

The title character is a hophead and a grifter out to fill his pockets with gelt - and fill his arm with big H. Hes run afoul of the fuzz. Hes out to screw the squarejohn world. He craves boss threads, fast rides, slick bitches. Hes bopping through the world of the quadruple cross. Hes hip. Hes so cool hes freon frigid. Hes fatuously fatalistic. He knows its avant garde to assume your own doom. Hes trying to kill his way through a maze of pissed-off lowlifes and beat the green room at Big Q, laboring under parole restrictions and a heroin habit. Its the creation of a young convict torqued on raisinjack, Mickey Spillane and frog existentialism - and it all works in the end.

Its kid-writer stuff that Eddie Bunker fans should dig on. It would have made the grade as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original back in the 50s along with the work of John D. McDonald and Kurt Vonnegut. Read it. It will make you want to turn tricks and geez dope. Im jonesing for some Horse right now. Fatalism is far-out. Hey, Big Dead Eddie - I grok your groove, Daddy-o!

James Ellroy

Stark

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E rnie Stark was not the nicest guy youd ever meet. Ask his friends. If he had any. He was a two-bit hustler who dreamt that the next score would be the big one. The one that would put him on easy street. But too often, he was outsmarted. If not by the sucker, then by the law.

Look at the latest situation he was in. Because of a stupid bust while he was still on parole, he was in bed with the cops. Stark had done a lot of shady things, but being a rat, a stool pigeon for the cops, was not a role he enjoyed. It was either that or going back to the slammer. Hed rather be a rat outside.

The cops knew that his Hawaiian pal, Momo, was a dealer. Small time stuff. They didnt want him; they wanted his supplier. If they arrested Momo, the next higher up on the drug chain would disappear. Theyd even arrest Momo if they knew where his goods were.

So, you hired a rat like Stark to get close to his pal and get the name of the supplier of Momos drugs. Easier said than done, mused Stark, sitting at the bar next to Momo in their favorite nightclub. It was 1962, and the Panama was the best popular club in Oceanview.