So her father was a hack?

“My father,” she said, “was a literate, sophisticated, erudite man.”

He was?

He loved Dickens, she said. “He was a great Joycean.”

He was?

“He corresponded with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had aspirations to be that kind of writer.”

She seemed uncertain where to go with this.

Finally: “He hated the Hardy Boys.”

For Truman Capote the outcome of his sojourn in west Kansas was decidedly mixed. In Cold Blood, which he immodestly heralded as a new form of non-fiction novel, was received with delirious approval; Norman Mailer dubbed Perry as one of the great characters in American literature. The book earned its author more than $2m, which he used to buy homes in Manhattan, the Hamptons, Palm Springs and Switzerland. But by all accounts such heavenly success also went to his head, and contributed to his downward spiral in a haze of lavish parties, drink and drugs. He failed to write another substantial work, and died in 1984.

‘When I write a long magazine piece that gets attention I feel like it’s more widely read now than it was ten years ago, by a long way. In fact, it feels excessively well read. Twenty years ago I might get a couple of notes in the mail and I’d hear about it maybe at a dinner party. And that would be the end of it, and it would go away very quickly. Ten years ago it would get passed around by email, and it would seem to have a life to me that would go on a little longer. Now the blogosphere picks it up and it becomes almost like a book: it lives for months. I’m getting responses to it for months. And I don’t think the journalism has gotten any better. It’s just the environment you publish it in is more able to rapidly get it to the people who are or might be interested in it.’