Brad Marley

In 1959, two ex-convicts traveled to Kansas for what they were led to believe was an easy score.

According to one of their former cell mates, a wealthy farmer from Kansas hid a large amount of cash on his property, and it was ripe for the picking.

The plan was simple: steal the cash, kill the family, and escape to Mexico. But only two parts of the plan came to fruition. They never found any money.

A brief about the unsolved murders in The New York Times captured enough of author Truman Capote's attention to cause him to convince fellow author Harper Lee to accompany him to Kansas so he could write about the crime before any arrests had been made. He spent six years on it — including interviews with the suspects – before it was published in four parts by The New Yorker.

Six years. That's equivalent to six decades in today's tweet-it-before-you-prove-it news cycle.

If Capote spent six years on a story today, the publisher would laugh him out of the building when he turned in his manuscript.

But Capote worked in a time when there wasn't as much urgency; you could let a story simmer before serving it to the public. You could make sure every word was accurate without somebody breathing down your neck to throw up something half-assed because they didn't want to be the last to file the report.

Obviously, those days are history, which makes this book somewhat of a recent relic.

I highly recommend it.