Here are the basic facts: on the evening of August 14, 1944, a Columbia student named Lucien Carr used his Boy Scout knife (of all things) to stab his lover, Dave Kammerer, in the chest after a drunken tiff in Riverside Park. The stab wounds didn't kill Kammerer, but Carr's panicked decision to dump him unconscious in the Hudson River finally finished him off.

Twenty-four hours later - after seeking the advice of friends and aimlessly drifting around the streets of Manhattan - Carr returned home to his mother's toney apartment and confessed everything. She found him a toney lawyer and the lawyer helped Carr to cop a plea. He was sentenced to ten years in a reformatory, served two, and had a long career afterwards at United Press International. And this story would have long since vanished into the world of forgotten minor murders had it not been for the fact that two of Carr's chums of the era happened to be William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.

At the time, Burroughs was a 30-year-old Harvard grad about to start his decades-long totentanz with hard drugs while Kerouac had recently dropped out from Columbia. Neither had started to write. But informed of the murder by Carr in the aftermath of dumping his lover's body in the drink, these two prototype hipsters were picked up by the cops. Though they didn't do any time for failing to report the crime, they did collaborate on a novel based on the murder. In the wake of Carr's death in 2005, James Grauerholz, the executor of the Burroughs estate, decided to excavate the manuscript, which had gathered dust in a box for decades, and give it a public airing.

Given Kerouac's notorious prolixity and his penchant for “spontaneous” prose - not to mention Burroughs' reputation as postwar America's pre-eminent junkie novelist - you'd expect And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks to be something of a literary car crash. But what's most surprising about this roman à clef is its quirky readability and its historic interest.

Granted, the entire exercise reads as a sort of quasi-existentialist attempt at pulp fiction. Even the names that the two writers chose as their narrative voices (Burroughs as Will Dennison, Kerouac as Milke Ryko) have a dimestore-novel feel. And in reading their side-by-side chapters (the two writers tossed the storyline between themselves, like a fictional hot potato) you do glimpse the genesis of their emerging prose styles and literary preoccupations. Burroughs comes across as the writer with far more narrative and stylistic control than Kerouac - whose penchant for the sloppy sentence is on display everywhere.

Though its story is a reinvention of the Carr/Kammerer case, the real reason to pick up the novel is for its depiction of bohemian downtown life in wartime New York - this is a book with all the monochromatic urban atmospherics of a photograph by Weegee. Its sexual daring and hardboiled language also mark it as being ahead of its time - and all ageing hipsters will relate to its portrait of life as lived in a grubby world of cheap hotel rooms and cheaper saloons.

And how did Burroughs and Kerouac come up with the title? It's simple, really. While writing the book, Burroughs allegedly turned on a radio and caught a news item about a fire at a circus, during which the broadcaster uttered the line: “... and the hippos were boiled in their tanks”. As they say in Brooklyn: Go figure.

And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac
Penguin Classics, £20; 224pp Buy the book

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