The Macallan Daggers Awards for Crime Writing, held at the Café Royal in Regent Street, London, in 2000 played host to one of the oddest literary competitions ever seen.

Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, had hoped to win with his Wainewright The Poisoner, "an impressionistic approach to the life of a relatively obscure Victorian artist and unscrupulous poisoner", but lost to Edward Bunker, a man who as a career criminal had once been on the FBI's " most wanted" list. He was the author of the rather less prosaic Mr Blue, the story of his violent life.

Bunker's father was a stagehand, his mother a Busby Berkeley chorus girl. They divorced when he was 5 and his mother abandoned him at 8, by which time Bunker had already damaged property and set fire to a neighbour's garage.

He was sent to a foster home, but ran away, turned to crime and was then sent to a military academy. By 14 he had spent a great deal of time in the US Juvenile Hall system for shoplifting, and by 15 his crimes included drug dealing, robbery, forgery and extortion then took a still uglier turn when he was arrested again for sticking a fork in a dog's eye. He was paroled and sent to live with his aunt; when he then tried to rob a liquor store the authorities lost patience and sent him to San Quentin prison. He was the youngest inmate the infamous Californian jail has held.

Here, "swimming in the meanest milieu of society", Bunker quickly decided that a prisoner must chose "either to be predator or prey". Terrified of rape, he decided to make himself feared and slashed open the back of a serial killer who had flirted with him. Prison did not tame Bunker; instead it made him choose violence as his first resort. His novel The Animal Factory, made into a film directed by Steve Buscemi in 2000, later demonstrated the dehumanising process of detention. The old-lag character of Earl, who looks after the intelligent, anxious Ron, showed a rueful side to Bunker who had been judged exceptionally bright at school and no doubt could have benefited from Earl's wise words and tips on self-preservation.

During his 18 years in San Quentin and Folsom prisons, Bunker grew increasingly aware of the extent to which he had damned himself.

Louise Wallis, wife of the Hollywood producer Hal Wallis, had recognised Bunker's writing skill and made an early attempt to put him back on the rails. She introduced the young tearaway to Jack Dempsey, Tennessee Williams and Aldous Huxley, and as a teenager Bunker went swimming at William Randolph Hearst's castle.

Wallis stuck with Bunker over the years and kept him supplied in prison with literature. He came to admire Dostoevsky and Cervantes, who had written from their cells, and he determined to write his way out of crime.

This required commitment: Bunker wrote six novels and more than 100 short stories, over 17 years, before his first book, No Beast So Fierce, was published in 1973. Now with good reason to go straight, he was let out for the final time in 1975. It took Bunker many years to adjust to the "normal" world, and he nursed a grudge against it until his death. Unable to find regular work, he sometimes sold his blood to raise the money needed to send manuscripts to publishers and editors.

His debut made little immediate impact, but was later turned into the film Straight Time (1978), starring Dustin Hoffman. When Quentin Tarantino discovered the book he declared it "the finest crime novel ever written", and determined to put Bunker in his 1992 gangster bloodbath, Reservoir Dogs. Bunker played the minor character Mr Blue, but more importantly he met Buscemi — playing Mr Pink — on the set. He later worked as a technical advisor for Heat (1995) with Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Dennis Haysbert and Kevin Gage, showing them how to behave like ex-cons.

Two other books were published, Little Boy Blue (1981) and Dog Eat Dog (1996), before his full, widely admired autobiography Mr Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade was released in 1999. No Beast So Fierce has become a slow-burning success; the crime writer James Ellroy has called it "the most gritty and realistic novel about the West Coast criminality".

In 1985 Bunker won an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of Runaway Train. He had been commissioned to write the screen adaptation for Ellroy's novel, Suicide Hill. He is survived by his wife, Jennifer, and by their son.

Edward Bunker, author, actor and criminal, was born on December 31, 1933. He died on July 19, 2005, aged 71.