And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac
Penguin Classics, HK$192
When Lucien Carr killed his former lover David Kammerer in a New York park in August 1944, little could he have known the two men to whom he confided his crime would one day become the greatest storytellers of their generation. Carr's confidants were Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, who in the late 1950s pioneered the Beat movement. But in 1944, their failure to inform the authorities of Carr's crime resulted in their arrest as accessories after the fact to murder.
Both were later released without charge, while Carr served a two-year prison sentence for first-degree manslaughter.
At the time of the killing, Kerouac and Burroughs, together with Carr, Kammerer and a young aspiring poet named Allen Ginsberg, formed an artsy clique of Columbia and Harvard drop-outs based in New York. Kammerer's killing was a transformative experience for Kerouac. Barely a year later he began writing the first chapter of a book dealing with the episode. Burroughs, by contrast, was more interested in feeding his morphine addiction but somehow, Kerouac cajoled him into the project.