Come in with the Dutchman

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

Finally available in print, a layered, idiosyncratic screenplay about one of the most notorious gangsters in American history written by one of its greatest counterculture icons, the author of Queer and Naked Lunch

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.

Taking these “last words” as a loose starting point, over several years in the 1960s, Burroughs created his own fantasia of Dutch Schultz, a narrative that takes the form of a film script to explore crime, addiction, violence, and power. Appearing in a newly edited and reworked version beginning with an illuminating introduction from James Grauerholz, Come in with the Dutchman is an exciting new version of one of Burroughs’s most layered and idiosyncratic projects.