In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer, whose sexual advances he´d grown tired of rejecting. Carr, had come to them and confessed; Kerouac helped him get rid of the weapon - neither told the police. For this failing they were arrested. Months later the two writers - unpublished at the time - collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a fictionalised account of the week leading up to the killing. They wrote alternating chapters - Burroughs writing as sometime bartender and workaday detective Will Dennison, Kerouac as Mike Ryko, a merchant seaman. Unpublished until now, this is a kind of crime novel of humans stewing in their inactivity, and a remarkable insight into the lives and literary development of two great writers.