Mister Blue’s Literary Debut

An early novel by Edward Bunker, the career criminal turned author turned actor who played Mr. Blue in Quentin Tarantino’s seminal Reservoir Dogs, has turned up two years after the actor’s death.

A press release lets us know that a thriller named Stark was written by Bunker in the early 1960s and was “a harbinger of the books that brought him critical acclaim such as No Beast So Fierce and The Animal Factory, yet it remained unpublished in his lifetime and the forgotten manuscript was only recently discovered in the vaults of British independent crime publisher, No Exit Press.” Cool.

Cut to, “From September 3rd the book is available for the first time in hardback and paperback editions with a specially commissioned foreword by U.S. crime writer James Ellroy and an afterword by the author’s widow, Jennifer Steele.”

The author died on July 19, 2005, at the age of 71.