Mr Blue, Bunker's long gestating autobiography, is a curiously familiar read for anyone even tangentially acquainted with his small but significant oeuvre. As a writer of fiction, you see, he clings to that crusty (and discredited) aphorism, write what you know. So, in the four novels we've seen (and probably the half dozen or so he pecked out before getting into print with the coruscating No Beast So Fierce), are laid the bones of this story. "Perseverance," he writes, "is fundamental to my nature."

Largely abandoned by his parents, Bunker was dragged up in a series of vaguely sinister homes until his early teens brought him into inevitable conflict with the law. Thus, much of this book is spent in the predictably sadistic care of various penal institutions, dealing with both official and gaolee politics and violence. Lots of violence: see his novel, The Animal Factory. "In the cage he who cannot stand alone must certainly fall."

Prisoner A20284 is largely ambivalent to his record. Proud, certainly, of what he got away with, of the capacity to survive in a system where survival is anything but guaranteed. A code of ethics is invoked. And prison, as he is quick to admit, goes with the job. His glee at making old bones is palpable. And he resents being boxed into the side-taking race wars that swamped the prison system in the mid-60s. "It is impossible," he writes, "to have a civil society without civility."

The book is not without a degree of self-mythologising, however; Bunker has earned that right. Teen crim (he was the youngest ever inmate of the infamous San Quentin) to respected novelist and Oscar nominated screenwriter. And yet the clues were there all along, from a genius level IQ in his youth, through a voracious, lifelong reading habit (in gaol he devoured novels and psychology textbooks, Sartre and Camus). And then there's Mrs Hal Wallis, a Hollywood bleeding heart known to take wayward youth under her not inconsiderable wing. With Bunker she played the long game, both encouraging his fledging attempts to write - not many go on the lam with a portable typewriter and a half-finished novel - and introducing him to, amongst others, William Randolph Hearst, Aldous Huxley, Tennessee Williams and that mad old ninny Ayn Rand. "It was insane to take on the world," he concludes, "even if the world started it." Mr Blue suggests, however, that just once in a while it's a fair fight.