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.

Praise for The Last Words of Dutch Schultz:

“This is Burroughs’s most accessible, tightly knit work of fiction. . . . Laid out as a stripped-down movie script it’s almost as if this is the form that Burroughs has always needed.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The very name of Burroughs conjures up contorted works of quirky brilliance, a warp of vision through a wild woof of laughter. We have, instead, astoundingly, the script for a gangster film, pure and simple. Well, not so pure . . . but very simple and very good. . . . It reveals the humorist in Burroughs, the helplessly appalled, obsessed joker.”—New York Times Book Review

“The rigid conventions of screenwriting give Burroughs’s savage vision a Haiku-like purity and intensity.”—Newsday

“Entertaining, frequently gritty and full of ugly, funny, occasionally shocking surprises.”—Chicago Tribune

Praise for William S. Burroughs:

“A creator of grim fairy tales for adults, Burroughs spoke to our nightmare fears and, still worse, to our nightmare longings . . . More than any other postwar wordsmith, he bridged generations; popularity in the youth culture is greater now than during the heady days of the Beats.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Of all the Beat Generation writers, William S. Burroughs was the most dangerous . . . He was anarchy’s double agent, an implacable enemy of conformity and of all agencies of control-from government to opiates.”—Rolling Stone

“The most important writer to emerge since World War II . . . For his sheer visionary power, and for his humor, I admire Burroughs more than any living writer, and most of those who are dead.”—J. G. Ballard

“Burroughs seems to revel in a new medium . . . A medium totally fantastic, spaceless, timeless, in which the normal sentence is fractured, the cosmic tries to push its way through the bawdry, and the author shakes the reader as a dog shakes a rat.”—Anthony Burgess