Come In with the Dutchman

“Burroughs’s voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.”—Joan Didion

The layered, idiosyncratic screenplay about one of America’s most notorious gangsters by one of its greatest counterculture icons, available to readers for the first time

Before he was gunned down in October 1935 in the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey, Arthur Flegenheimer—alias Dutch Schultz—was considered New York’s number one racketeer. Schultz survived for two days after the shooting, in a hospital room that was guarded around the clock. A police stenographer was stationed at his bedside in the hope of learning the identity of his assailant, but instead, he recorded Dutch’s fevered fantasies, images from his childhood, youth, and his life of crime.

From these “last words,” William S. Burroughs created his own fantasia of Dutch Schultz, rife with the dark humor, surreal insight, and ferocious energy for which Burroughs is known. This unconventional script-style novel is one of Burroughs’ most accessible works, marrying the swagger of a classic gangster film with tender explorations of violence, addiction, and the precarity of a life on the margins.

Appearing in a newly edited and reworked version with an illuminating introduction from acclaimed Beat scholar James Grauerholz, Come In with the Dutchman is an exciting new version of one of Burroughs’s most layered and idiosyncratic projects.