Film at Eleven

The BBC reports that crime novelist - and Reservoir Dogs‘ Mr Blue - has died in California aged 71.

According to the IMDb…

Has been convicted of numerous crimes since early childhood, including smashing a neighbor’s backyard incinerator with a claw hammer at 3, setting fire to a neighbor’s garage at 4 and jamming a fork in a boy’s eyeball at 15. By 17, Bunker had established himself as the Doogie Howser of the California penal system, parlaying a series of robberies, assaults and the stabbing of a prison guard into a stint in San Quentin (he was the youngest inmate there at the time).

And it was his 18 years in US prisons that inspired him to write his first novel, No Beast So Fierce - the story of a paroled thief who had trouble re-entering society - in 1973.

Fellow author James Ellroy described is as “quite simply one of the great crime novels of the past 30 years - perhaps the best novel of the Los Angeles underworld ever written”.

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