EDWARD Bunker, a former convict who learned to write in prison before achieving literary fame as a crime novelist and no small success as an actor, has died at the age of 71.

A diabetic, Bunker died of complications following surgery to improve circulation to his legs.

At 17, Bunker became the youngest inmate at San Quentin after he stabbed a prison guard at a youth detention facility and later escaped from a Los Angeles County jail, where he was serving a sentence for another crime.

It was during his 18 years of incarceration for robbery, cheque forgery and other crimes that Bunker learned to write.

In 1973, while still in prison, he made his literary debut with No Beast So Fierce, a novel about a paroled thief who has trouble re-entering society.

Author James Ellroy called the novel "quite simply one of the great crime novels of the past 30 years; perhaps the best novel of the Los Angeles underworld ever written". It was made into the 1978 movie Straight Time, starring Dustin Hoffman.

Bunker co-wrote the script and played a minor role as a criminal who helps Hoffman plan a heist. Other big-screen credits include 1985's Runaway Train, an action drama about two escaped convicts played by Jon Voight and Eric Roberts.

Themes of crime and prison life appeared in his other novels, The Animal Factory, Little Boy Blue and Dog Eat Dog.

"It has always been as if I carry chaos with me the way others carry typhoid. My purpose in writing is to transcend my existence by illuminating it, " Bunker once told an interviewer.

As an actor, Bunker had nearly two dozen roles, most notably as Mr Blue in Quentin Tarantino's 1992 violent drama Reservoir Dogs.

More recently, he played a convict in the remake of The Longest Yard.

With his gravelly voice, a nose broken in innumerable fights and a scar from a 1953 knife wound that ran from his forehead to his lip, the compact and muscular ex-con was ideal for typecasting as a bigscreen thug.

Bunker's last published book, a 2000 memoir entitled Education of a Felon, features an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Styron praising him as "an artist with a unique and compelling voice".

"Bunker wrote with energy and a muscular style that very few people have, and his words just literally jump off the page, " said screenwriter Robert Dellinger, a longtime friend. The pair first met in 1973 at the federal prison on Terminal Island, where Dellinger was the inmate founder and teacher of the first creative writing class sanctioned by the US Bureau of Prisons. At the time, Bunker was being held in an isolation cell while awaiting trial in connection with a Beverly Hills bank robbery.

An only child, Bunker was born in Hollywood in 1933.

His motherwas a chorus girl in vaudeville and Busby Berkeley musicals, and his alcoholic father was a stagehand and occasional studio grip.

After his parents divorced when Bunker was four, he spent the next half-dozen years in and out of foster homes and military academies, from which he frequently ran away.

By the time of his first criminal conviction, aged 14, he was living by his wits on the streets of Los Angeles.

Although a voracious reader during his time in reform schools, Bunker was inspired to write by the experience of San Quentin, fellow inmate Caryl Chessman, the notorious "Red Light Bandit", and the publication of his book Cell 2455, Death Row.

Louise Wallis, the wife of film producer Hal Wallis and a prominent benefactor, befriended Bunker. She sent him a portable typewriter, a dictionary, a thesaurus and a subscription to the Sunday edition of the New York Times.