And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by William S Burroughs and Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac, Burroughs's friend, was often plain downbeat. And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a collaborative effort by Kerouac and Burroughs from 1945, is a lost novel by two writers who became icons of the Beat Generation. At the time, they were unknown and unpublished drifters hustling to get by in New York City. The book, transfixingly readable, provides a fictionalised account of a real-life murder that occurred in Manhattan on 14 August 1944. Lucien Carr, an intimate of the Burroughs-Kerouac circle, stabbed his lover, David Kammerer, during an alcoholic brawl. In a panic, Carr rolled Kammerer, still conscious, into the Hudson River, where he drowned.

Kerouac helped Carr to dispose of the weapon (a Boy Scout knife) down a riverside sewer grating. But the body — a "floater" — was found by the New York Coast Guard bobbing off 108th Street. The killing made front page news across America: Carr, a handsome Columbia University student, had killed a homosexual in a Pernod-fuelled tiff. Like Burroughs, Carr was an outcast from patrician St Louis society in thrall to the dark side of New York..

After Carr was charged with seconddegree murder, Burroughs, 31, and Kerouac, 23, decided to turn the drama into a Dashiell Hammett-style detective novel. They had been introduced by Carr, ironically, in a New York flat belonging to Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Parker. Each would write alternate chapters based on the part of the murder case he knew best. "And the hippos were boiled in their tanks" — a phrase Burroughs had heard in a radio report about a circus fire — provided the somewhat off-putting title. Not surprisingly, the novel was turned down by every New York publisher. America had just emerged from the Hitler conflict and did not wish to be reminded of a local nastiness. Following Lucien Carr's death in 2005, however, the Burroughs estate decided that the novel should see the light of day.

The book is hardly a classic, yet it memorably evokes the demi-monde of New York at the war's end, with its gallery of jazz-enthused, morphine-injecting proto Beats and other hipsters. The honky-tonk parlours of Harlem, the Automats, bars and spaghetti joints along 57th Street are rendered with a documentary, hard-boiled accuracy. Kerouac, finding his literary voice, writes: "I walked towards Columbus Circle where two big trucks went by that made me want to travel far" — words that foreshadow his 1957 novel On the Road. As a period piece, the novel can't be beat..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Lucien Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer, whose sexual advances he'd seemingly grown tired of rejecting. Carr, still in bloodstained clothes, had come to each of them and confessed; Kerouac helped him get rid of the weapon - neither told the police. For this failing they were arrested. Months later the two writers - unpublished at the time - collaborated on "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks", a fictionalized account of the summer of the killing. They wrote alternating chapters - Burroughs writing as sometime bartender and workaday detective Will Dennison, Kerouac as Mike Ryko, an Irish merchant seaman.From this intensely personal material they made a hard-boiled account of a group of friends moving through each other's apartments, killing time drinking, necking, talking and taking drugs, and haphazardly drifting towards a bloody crime - flabby, likeable Ramsey Allen trailing after the beautiful Phillip Tourian, constantly angering him with his endless desire to please. Unpublished until now, this is a kind of crime novel of humans stewing in their inactivity, and a remarkable insight into the lives and literary development of two great writers.