Bailed after what he claimed was the accidental gunshot homicide of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer (“Come on, Bill, let’s do our William Tell act”), William Burroughs entered the byzantine byways of the Mexican justice system of the early 1950s. At one juncture, the Primordial Hipster finds himself in the office of some high-rolling shyster or other, and tartly remarks – ventriloquising through his scarcely fictive alter-ego, the eponymous ‘Junkie’ – “Criminal law is one of th...
