“Compact, brilliantly detailed” this sixties L. A. noir thriller is “[a] posthumous wild ride from a modern master of crime fiction” (Publishers Weekly).
Ex-con. Author. Actor. Legend. Edward Bunker is one of the acknowledged masters of crime fiction. Written in the late 1960’s and discovered after Bunker’s death in 2005, Stark is his first and perhaps his most explosive novel ever.
1962. Oceanview, California. The girls are beautiful. The dope is cheap. The squares here are ripe for the plucking—easy money for a man with a plan. Ernie Stark is a hophead and a grifter out to make a big score. If he has to screw over everyone in town, he will. The problem is one more misstep will find him locked up for good.
Violent, lightening paced and exotic, filed with the most wonderful cast of lowlifes you’ll ever meet and dialogue that crackles, this is the lost novel for mystery lovers everywhere and the legion of fans of the legendary Edward Bunker.
Praise for Edward Bunker
“Bunker is a true original of American letters.” —James Ellroy, bestselling author of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential
“The best first person crime novel I have ever read.” —Quentin Tarantino on Little Boy Blue
“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 on Dog Eat Dog
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.