SOURCE: "Alexander Trocchi: The Biggest Fiend of All," in The Antioch Review, Vol. 50, No. 3, Summer, 1992, pp. 458-471.

In the following essay, Campbell presents an overview of the works of Alexander Trocchi.

Cain's Book, Alexander Trocchi's drug-related master-crime, is a novel to give to minors, a book to corrupt young people. It has been banned, burned, prosecuted, refused by book-distributors everywhere, condemned for its loving descriptions of heroin use and coarse sexual content. Trocchi, a Scotsman, died in London in 1984. Since completing Cain's Book a quarter of a century earlier, he had written hardly anything. It's not difficult to see why. Cain's Book is more than a novel: it is a way of life. The book is autobiography and fiction at once, the journal of a fiend, a stageby-stage account of the junkie's Odyssey in New York, an examination of the mind under the influence, a rude gesture in...