Can you trust Truman Capote? In Cold Blood, true crime and what happens when murder becomes literature

A little while ago, I asked a question that probably isn't advisable for somebody who spends quite a lot of time writing about other people.

Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk's Life of M got me thinking about it. Joan Didion provided the warning. And Truman Capote wandered briefly into the argument, having spectacularly demonstrated what can happen when a writer's friends discover that the funny little man at their dinner table has been paying considerably more attention than they realised.

Minor works, major joy: Why we should read authors’ lesser-known texts

Not every literary treasure announces itself with a full-page review or a Booker Prize shortlist. Some arrive quietly, tucked into the back of collected editions or discovered decades after their author’s death.

These are the misfit texts: the ghost stories, experimental fragments, and one-off essays that never quite made it into the canon but hold a strange power all their own. They’re small, sometimes imperfect, but full of clues. In them, we catch glimpses of writers unguarded, playful, or restless, working things out before the world was watching.