Chapter & Verse: In Cold Blood

When Truman Capote took the train out to western Kansas in 1959, he was chasing eight column inches about four senseless murders and ended up inventing a genre that nearly hollowed him out. The table wrestles with the enduring chill of a massacre carried out for forty dollars, the moral rot behind Capote's obsession with Perry Smith, and whether a masterpiece can survive its own manipulations. It is a sharp, atmospheric look at the book that made true crime literate—and demanded a terrible price for the privilege.