SOURCE: "Then and Now: In Cold Blood Revisited," in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 72, Summer, 1996, pp. 467-74.

[In the essay below, Garrett discusses Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and its impact on the true-crime genre.]

Now it is a matter of memory, but then it was an experience. Not simply a memorable event, but an experience lived in and through and worth remembering, one of those rare occurrences which, even after all is said and done, modified and revised by time, can be said to have changed things.

In my house, which is, among other things, a hopeless clutter and chaos of books, placed in no known or discernible order, I can go directly to it, no groping and searching, and lift Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, hardcover, first printing, off the shelf. Partly this is because of the unusual book jacket (slightly torn and frayed since 1965) consisting...