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Excerpt:
True-crime author Ann Rule recommends investigating these murder accounts
By ANN RULE
May 19, 2007; Page P8
1. In Cold Blood
By Truman Capote
Random House, 1965
Writing on true crime requires a capacity to deliver a kind of psychological autopsy of both the dead and the deadly. Truman Capote''s "In Cold Blood," about the murder of a Kansas farm family in 1959, superbly exemplifies that skill. In a classic true-crime story the central question is not the how but the why -- why did this happen? The case must be complex, the characters -- including the detectives and prosecutors -- unpredictable. Capote''s mesmerizing book, which I read when it was first published, was the inspiration that led me to try, on my own, to get inside the mind of a murderer -- which is how it happened that I did my study, 15 years later, of Ted Bundy, poster boy of serial killers.
Despite latter-day criticism of Capote''s ethics and technique, he continues to be the author whose singular work represented a new way of getting at the truth of so dark a crime.
