And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

Just before dawn on August 14, 1944, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer, who had been drinking and flirting all night, began to argue—and wrestle—in Riverside Park. Carr stabbed Kammerer. Kammerer passed out. Carr rolled his body into the Hudson. He’d tied Kammerer’s arms together with shoelaces, and weighted his pockets with rocks.

Fictionalizations ensued: Both perp and victim were regulars of Columbia University’s literary scene, and had no shortage of instant biographers. Among those who took a turn at retelling this Verlaine and Rimbaud were John Hollander, William Gaddis, Anatole Broyard and James Baldwin. But the murder’s most famous, though unpublished, revision came from the team of “Will Dennison” and “Mike Ryko”—otherwise known as William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, years before On the Road and Naked Lunch.

Their collaboration is now available, 60-odd years after they first typed out l’affaire Carr-Kammerer in alternating chapters. Carr is “Phillip Tourian,” Kammerer is “Al”; the murder now takes place on a rooftop. 158 pages in, Tourian knocks at Dennison’s door: “I just killed Al and threw the body off the warehouse.”

No true-crime details are revealed, despite the fact that Burroughs and Kerouac were closest to the case: Burroughs heard Carr’s confession; Kerouac spent a day hanging with Carr before he turned himself in to the police. The prose is bad, though the Burroughs/Dennison sections are funner than Kerouac’s/Ryko’s. The title? Lore has it coming from a radio report of a fire at a Connecticut circus. Burroughs and Kerouac overheard the line while drinking at a bar at Columbus Circle. This was back when you could still drink at a bar at Columbus Circle. Viva la Beats! But woe to the marketers of this boring curio.

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