AND THE HIPPOS WERE BOILED IN THEIR TANKS

In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer, whose sexual advances he'd grown tired of rejecting. Carr, had come to them and confessed; Kerouachelped 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Months later the two writers - unpublished at the time - collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a fictionalised account of the week leading up to the killing. They wrote alternating chapters - Burroughs writing as sometime bartender and workaday detective Will Dennison, Kerouac as Mike Ryko, a merchant seaman.

From this intensely personal material they made a hardboiled account of a group of friends moving through each other's apartments, killing time drinking, necking, talking and taking drugs, and haphazardly drifting twoards 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 Unpublished until now, this is a kind of crime novel of humans stewing in their inactivity, and a remarkable insight into the lives and literary development of two great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.