Stark: A Novel
Authors: Edward Bunker
Praise for Edward Bunker
______________________
“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
“It’s 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 society’s outcasts with a passion and insight that comes from having lived life close to the bone.”
—
Los Angeles Times“Bunker shoots straight—his 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 Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
and George Jackson’s
Soledad Brother
in the front rank of prison literature—a stone classic.”—
Time Out“[Little Boy Blue]
is a scalding experience—and 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
____________________
Eward Bunker
Foreword by James Ellroy
Afterword by Jennifer Steele
St. Martin’s 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 author’s 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. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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 swindling—Fiction. 2. Nineteen sixties—Fiction. 3. California—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.U47 S73 2008
813’.54—dc22
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
___________
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. Bunker’s San Quentin jolts cannot be found. The short novel,
Stark
, apparently of late-60s/early-70s vintage, was discovered after Mr. Bunkers 2005 death.
It’s thus a period book within a period book. Set in the early 60s in a Southern California beach town, it’s a wiiiiiild hybrid of 50s paperback-original pulp/noir and punk’s fantasy. It’s 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”. He’s run afoul of the fuzz. He’s out to screw the squarejohn world. He craves boss threads, fast rides, slick bitches. He’s bopping through the world of the quadruple cross. He’s hip. He’s so cool he’s freon frigid. He’s fatuously fatalistic. He knows it’s avant garde to assume your own doom. He’s 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. It’s the creation of a young convict torqued on raisinjack, Mickey Spillane and frog existentialism - and it all works in the end.
It’s 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. I’m jonesing for some “Horse” right now. Fatalism is far-out. Hey, Big Dead Eddie - I grok your groove, Daddy-o!
James Ellroy
Stark
__________
E
rnie Stark was not the nicest guy you’d 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. He’d rather be a rat — outside.
The cops knew that his Hawaiian pal, Momo, was a dealer. Small time stuff. They didn’t want him; they wanted his supplier. If they arrested Momo, the next higher up on the drug chain would disappear. They’d 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 Momo’s 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.
Complicating things for Stark was that he was slowly getting hooked on heroin. Shit that his pal Momo was supplying at cut-rate prices to his buddy. He wasn’t hooked yet, but he was getting there. It was what had got him in this spot with the cops. He now had a twice-a-day habit. He had a growing monkey on his back.
He also had to keep an eye on Dummy, a mute who everyone had avoided in the joint. He and Dummy had been in prison together. He for a bunko caper that went bad, Dummy for manslaughter. No con ever touched Dummy, after the one who tried to get too friendly and later wound up dead. Stark had even learned some basic phrases to sign to Dummy, but the guy read lips. You soon learned never to kid him — to his face.
Dummy hung around the club, watching things. He had some sort of a deal with Momo. Stark guessed he was a runner. Maybe he could lead him to the Man?
Stark looked at his watch. He was late. Crowley would be pissed. Fuck him. How was he going to make his meet, with Dummy watching his every move? Dummy was no friend. He almost never smiled. And when he did, somebody died.