In the early hours of August 14, 1944, two drunk and distressed men quarrelled in a New York park. After a fight, the teenage Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer in the chest. He was later to claim that he had been forced into violence to defend himself against the persistent sexual advances of the older man. Then, after tying Kammerer's arms together and filling the pockets of his trousers with stones, Carr rolled the bleeding body into the Hudson, which, conveniently for the disposal of corpses, ran beside the park. A few hours later, a friend heard the killer's confession and urged him to surrender to the police. After a day spent drinking in the city's bars with a different friend, Carr did just that.

The killing of Kammerer would have been long forgotten by all but the most diligent students of the history of New York crime if it were not for the identities of Carr's two friends. One was William S Burroughs; the other was Jack Kerouac. Carr had been essential to the coming together of the nascent Beat movement. Through his troubled relationship with Kammerer he knew Burroughs. He also knew Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac and had introduced one to the other and both to Burroughs. The murder was deeply shocking to all three aspiring writers. So they did what any aspiring writers would do in such circumstances. They strove to translate it into fiction.

Ginsberg started but never finished a long story he called The Bloodsong. Kerouac and Burroughs joined forces to write a novel, each adopting a different narrative voice and composing alternating chapters. The result was And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. (The self-consciously offbeat but memorable title supposedly comes from a news story about a catastrophic fire at a zoo that Buroughs heard on the radio.) Publishers were unmoved by the manuscript at the time, but now, more than 60 years later, Penguin has raised it to immediate classic status at first publication.

It is almost impossible to come to the book without preconceptions derived from either knowlege of the murder or of its authors' later works. Kerouac in particular forged a career out of thinly fictionalising real experiences and this was one of his earliest attempts at it. Even the smallest details in the story match what is known about the actual events. In the book, as (one assumes) in reality, the characters mooch around New York, looking for ways to distract themselves from the ennui and lack of direction in their lives. They drink, smoke dope, talk about sex rather more often than they engage in it, and sit in a succession of indistinguishable dives, discussing Rimbaud, philosophy and French films. The retrospective awareness that both readers and writers have of where this is all going to end hangs heavily over the narrative. As a novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is poor stuff. As an insight into the formative years of the Beats, it's fascinating.

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

Penguin £20 pp218

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