This image is the cover for the book Little Boy Blue

Little Boy Blue

Here is the quintessential story of a young hoodlum's coming of age in post-Depression America, from the undisputed master of the genre.

“Bunker is a true original of American letters. His books are criminal classics.” ―James Ellroy

“The best first-person crime novel I’ve ever read.” —Quentin Tarantino

Alex Hamilton is young, intelligent, savvy, and independent—but also subject to violent fits of rage. Raised within the confines of a system that has done nothing but provide him with pain, his frustration and anger are completely natural—and inherently dangerous. Rebellious since his parents split up, Alex is constantly running from foster homes and institutions, yearning to be with his father, a broken man who cannot give his son the home he desperately needs. As Alex is pulled between well-meaning but exhausted social workers and viciously cruel authority figures, his emotions and actions are forever careening off these two disparate influences. Only one constant remains: his no-good, criminal-minded peers, who are all too ready to plant illegal ideas in a young, bright mind that’s already well on its way to social deviancy. Little Boy Blue vividly documents this destruction, allowing the reader to sift through the wreckage of a childhood gone terribly awry.

Praise for Little Boy Blue

“Bunker shoots straight—his direct and transparent prose captures the “primacy of violence” that defines life in the slammer . . . Bunker clearly articulates the “code” of prison life and the pathology of the career criminal in raw, muscular prose.” ―Kirkus Reviews

Edward Bunker

Edward Bunker (1933–2005) spent many years in prison before he found success as a novelist. Born in Los Angeles, he accumulated enough terms in juvenile hall that he was finally jailed, becoming at seventeen the youngest-ever inmate at San Quentin State Prison. He began writing during that period, inspired by his proximity to the famous death-row inmate and author Caryl Chessman. Incarcerated off and on throughout the next two decades, Bunker was still in jail when his first book, No Beast So Fierce, was published in 1973. Paroled eighteen months later, he gave up crime permanently, and spent the rest of his life writing novels, many of which drew on his experiences in prison. Also an actor, his most well-known role was Mr. Blue, one of the bank robbers in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Bunker died in 2005.

St. Martin’s Griffin