About a third of the way into Ed Bunker’s fourth novel you realise why it was he so thrilled you in the first place. Excitement. Like Charles Willeford - a good comparison - Bunker’s best stuff is exciting to read.

The 63 year-old’s career is extraordinary by any standards. From age 10 he was yo-yoing in and out of reform school, a dope dealer by 16, and San Quentin’s youngest inmate two years later. With cheque fraud, extortion and armed robbery he made the FBI’s Most Wanted and earned more well deserved gaol time. And while incarcerated, like in some cheesy bio-pic, heard the clack of Death Row resident Caryl Chessman’s typewriter and traded his soul for literature.

His 1972 debut, No Beast So Fierce, is one of the classics of crime fiction: energetic, taut and, again, thrilling. Bunker himself appeared in Straight Time, the Hoffman vehicle culled from the book, and since has divided time between intermittent novels, screenplays and bit-playing; look for him in over 30 movies, not least Hill’s The Long Riders, masterly paranoia-fest Miracle Mile, and, of course, Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs. (Compare Qurentino’s picture to No Beast. It’s instructive.)

Dog Eat Dog is breaking no new ground for Bunker, aside from the switch to third person. Troy, ‘Mad Dog’ McCain and Diesel are three career-cons with nothing to lose. The bizarre Three Strikes law means, two convictions down, any violation - petty theft to genocide - earns life. This trio - these "bloody marauders" as William Styron’s introduction would have them - are never going straight so it’s all bets off.

They start by extorting dope dealers (who they going to complain to?), then get caught up in a pay-back kidnapping for an acquaintance in a Mexico gaol, but disaster looms. ‘Mad Dog’ didn’t get his name for nothing and, pumped on drugs, he’s increasingly unpredictable. The corpses are piling up and something’s got to give.

Plot aside - it’s only really there as a hanger - Dog Eat Dog is a book about modern criminality. Troy and the rest are products of their homeland, as American as Mom and apple pie. "Thieves," he said recently, "are the extrapolation of laissez-faire capitalism." The California they inhabit is decaying from inside. They cruise Los Angeles recalling when you could walk these streets in safety, when sidewalks were not full of winos and AIDS sufferers. Homelessness, intolerance and drugs are everywhere. Bunker deals particularly well with race - casual hatred bred of prison divides, the easy language of abuse. It’s hard but never prurient. Crime, Bunker says, has become brutally riven along racial and class lines: "hard times make hard people."

Bunker is one of only a handful of writers - Thomas Harris is another - who can fold real cinematic pacing into fiction, a certain breathlessness that drags the reader on like an express train. He allies it to a pacy unpredictability to keep one step ahead of his audience. You never know where it will end.

The last 70 or so pages of Dog Eat Dog are superb - fast, desperate, electrifying. There is real poetry in a lonely finale that (intentionally?) recalls the Joseph H Lewis noir masterpiece Gun Crazy. They are just the best part of a quite remarkable book.