And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

A collaborative detective novel by Beat icons Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, AND THE HIPPOS WERE BOILED IN THEIR TANKS was inspired by the real-life murder by their New York drinking buddy Lucien Carr, a brilliant Rimbaud-loving teenager who ended up killing his longtime homosexual stalker in Riverside Park and throwing the body into the Hudson River. Kerouac and Burroughs took turns writing chapters, with Burroughs writing about a bartender turned detective and Kerouac about a dissolute ex-Merchant Marine. Despite the murder mystery element, for the most part this novel describes the sordid, dreary lifestyle of restless young men living in New York at the end of World War II. First published in 2008, AND THE HIPPOS WERE BOILED IN THEIR TANKS is a decidedly amateur work, and the writing is a far cry from the distinctive voices the two writers would later develop, but it remains an intriguing literary relic from the early days of the Beat movement.