No Beast So Fierce
Edward Bunker
No Exit pbk, 301 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1993)
He might exit the action in double-quick time, but when Quentin Tarantino cast Ed Bunker as Mr Blue in his delirious Reservoir Dogs, he knew exactly what he was doing. Born in Hollywood some fifty-five years ago, Bunker worked briefly in movies, but spent most of his life until 1975 behind bars on a variety of charges, from armed robbery to assault to smack. Inside he gained both a typewriter and a voracious reading habit (Wolfe, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dostoevsky) until in 1973 he published this, his debut novel, now thoughtfully repackaged by No Exit Press, replete with useful introduction by William Styron.
Max Dembo is an habitual criminal, released back into society after eight years for passing forged cheques with a determination to go straight. But as Max quickly appreciates, if the only people you know are felons, if you're surrounded by people high on one thing or another, and if you have a parole officer like the callous, cynical Rosenthal, then within hours you'll already be backing a loser. Petty crimes and a jailbreak for a black friend lead to bigger things, culminating in a jewel heist with tragic consequences.
No Beast So Fierce hit the screen rather unremarkably in 1977, directed by Ulu Grosbard as Straight Time, with Dustin Hoffman in the Demo role and Bunker himself in support, but it's hard to imagine any film with a self-regarding, lack-lustre performer like Hoffman doing justice to the ferocity of the source novel. The temptation is always there to claim for it authenticity without actual proof to back it up, but the fact is that Bunker's book feels right from start to finish. The niggardly details of the parole system, of the guns they acquire, of drugs, of alarm systems - the backgrounding and sparky dialogue is concrete enough to make the somewhat autobiographical plotting stand up on its own. In the early passages the debutante author has a slight tendency towards overwriting as Demo steps back into a world he left the best part of a decade before with typically disorienting results, but once into the meat he settles to an urgent truthfulness that impresses, particularly in its honest, forthright treatment of race. (Bunker wrote magazine features about the dangers of racial conflict in prisons from his cell, Styron reports).
And given Tarantino's confessed magpie approach to his debut, it's not too much of a leap of imagination to see the fuck-up robbery at the heart of his movie drawn heavily from the brilliant, breathless one Bunker offers in here; a taut, unpredictable affair subverted by betrayal and ultimately, of course, revenge.
This is a novel about rage and frustration, about the way society reads an ex-con and the way an ex-con reads society. What Bunker is saying is that it takes an extraordinary individual to break the lowlife cycle a city like Los Angeles offers someone like Demo, and Max Demo, for all his intelligence and self-assurance, has neither the power nor, more crucially, the real inclination to break that cycle: the phenomenal climax is therefore an arrogant, resigned scream of defiant nihilism. No Beast So Fierce, as Styron tells us, is indeed a remarkable novel, the work of a vigorous and important writer.