Over the last 40 years, the town of Garden City, Kansas, has twice collided head-on with the disruptive forces at large in the wider world. The first time was unsettling. The second changed it forever.

The first collision came in 1959, when a pair of drifters named Perry Smith and Dick Hickok wandered into Holcomb, a tiny settlement 10 miles to the west of Garden City. When they left, rancher Herbert Clutter, his wife, and two of their children were dead, brutally murdered in a botched robbery. There could be no plainer reminder that isolation is no insurance against the outside world. Even so, the after-effects probably would have been limited to the passing shock and some muttering about the need to lock doors had Truman Capote not installed himself at the Windsor Hotel, on Main Street in Garden City, and turned the incident into the best-selling book In Cold Blood (1965). Capote memorialized the area around Garden City as a land of "awesomely extensive" views, with "grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples," a land "more Far West than Middle West," so lonely that even other Kansans call it "out there."

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