Capote knew how gut-clenchingly suspenseful dialogue could be. "In Cold Blood" recounts the scene at the Clutter house twice: first in a quote that spans six pages, delivered by Nancy and Kenyon Clutter's English teacher, Larry Hendricks, one of the first people to find the bodies.

Then, 200 pages later, from Smith's taped confession, another quote spanning several pages, broken only by the interrogator's questions. In both of these crucial chapters, Capote restrains himself to only the barest of observations, as in this part, just as Smith begins to describe the first of the murders: "Perry frowns, rubs his knees with his manacled hands. 'Let me think a minute. Because along in here, things begin to get a little complicated. I remember. Yes, yes.'" You brace yourself for what comes next.

Of course, keeping that degree of aloofness meant that Capote had to leave a lot out of the story -- for instance, the awe and resentment the residents of the small Kansas town of Holcomb felt at the appearance of a high-flying reporter. Capote was smart to bring his childhood friend Harper Lee with him to help gain the confidence of the locals. But that didn't make them like him any more when "In Cold Blood" came out.

It wasn't until Plimpton did his own Kansas reporting for his biography of Capote that we hear Harold Nye, a Kansas Bureau of Information agent, describe visiting Capote and Lee in their hotel room and finding Capote lounging around in a "pink negligee, silk with lace." Quite possibly this is made up, but it goes to show how dramatic the culture shock was for everyone involved, and how it was all the more remarkable, then, that Capote came out of Kansas with so much story to tell.

Capote was a good listener. It's what earned him the confidence of the society ladies in Greenwich, Conn., and Manhattan, and it's what made him a good reporter. His accounts of Smith's small, paradoxical kindnesses to the doomed Clutters, like when he places a pillow under Kenyon's head before putting a gun to his temple, are a hundred times more effective in describing the tumult of emotions in a criminal's mind than an expert's analysis could ever have been.

Smith's divided conscience, what allows him to stop Hickock from raping Nancy Clutter, then go on to kill her anyway, and then, later, his infamous recollection of that night, "I really admired Mr. Clutter, right up until the moment I slit his throat," could be no starker from any mouth but Smith's own.

Today, it's hard to imagine what journalism was like before Capote and the others started looking closely at "ordinary" people, before they began making an earnest effort to, as Wolfe puts it, "deliver this felt sense of the quality of life at a particular time and place." At the time, though, a lot of other people in the literary world were dubious. New Yorker critic Renata Adler snottily summed up New Journalism as "zippy prose about inconsequential people," and it's a charge that most New Journalists, and Capote certainly, wouldn't have gone too far out of their way to deny. The lives of "inconsequential people," especially those caught in consequential events, have been fascinating readers for years -- both before Capote and the New Journalists and after.

Most recently, it's what drove so many people each day to the Portraits of Grief section in the New York Times. And it's part of the reason we continue to try to make sense of the psychology of crime -- even crime on such a horrific scale as the Sept. 11 attacks. And as for "zippy prose," as Wolfe pointed out in "The New Journalism," one need only try to imagine its opposite.

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