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4.0 out of 5 stars
Get the Dutchman, Oct 18 2000
In his final journals, Burroughs spoke forebodingly of the "pure killing purpose" which characterized his formative influences, of the hammer-blow "realism" which Conrad or Stendhal seemed to have in spades, the power of an author to grab the reader by the throat and put them in an imaginary world more real than our burnt-out sphere could ever sustain, and this in only a few words, a scrap of dialogue, a well-honed descriptive fragment. Burroughs' own wager with such intense literary economy involved many volumes of spasmodic hit-and-miss fragmentary visions, a cine-fantastique for television-shrunk minds, moments of intense brilliance and humor rising from a frostbitten plain of cold narrative tundra. But *Dutch Schultz* is startling in its word-for-word attention-grabbing coherence, its creeping aura of sustained criminal imagination, not to mention the closest Burroughs ever came to writing a fiction of mounting suspense, one of the most idiosyncratic "potboilers" you will ever read.Arthur Flegenheimer (a.k.a. Dutch Schultz) was gunned down in the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey in October 1935. Though he survived only two days after the shooting, a police stenographer was stationed at his bedside to record any incriminating evidence relating to the identity of his assassin(s). What was recorded in lieu of legal testimony was the fevered ramblings of the dying gangster, a "cut-up" of his youth and delinquent upbringing, his bloody rise to becoming Gotham's #1 racketeer, paroxysms of rage and grief at such a dark and brutal life. Happily for this reader, the obscurantism of the Burroughsian cut-up is constantly reworked into wonderful "dramatic" sequences, brass-knuckled wiseguy folklore soaked in the moneyed carnage of the mean streets. Perhaps Burroughs' lack of explicit Control metaphors here (the Nova Mob, the Black Meat, et al.) made this text convenient for academic criticism to overlook, which is a shame, since it is one of his best shorter works, second only to *Ghost of Chance*(1991). The Arcade edition which I'm reviewing here, with its disquieting graphic design (headlines and period photographs of gangster-era Gotham City and environs), amplifies the text to a chilling degree, sending the reader on greased rails into the black-and-white phantasmagoria of 1930's American gangland. Burroughs' script will never be filmed, of course, yet will always linger as an inspiration to overcome such contemporary disappointments as 1991's *Billy Bathgate*, where Dustin Hoffman as Dutch Schultz was surely great casting, but hardly a compensation for the film's slick expurgation of dirt-under-the-fingernails spittoon-juice gangster grunge.
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