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Ten years ago, Truman Capote angered his friends in the Concorde set by serving gossip from their private stock to hoi polloi. Anyone with the price of four issues of Esquire magazine could oink over the deviances of their social betters. Each issue carried a “chapter” of what Capote promised would be his most important work. He called it Answered Prayers and described it as a novel-in-progress about New York and European high society.

The first installment, “Mojave,” arched some eyebrows. The second, “La Cote Basque,” popped eyes. The author who charmed readers with Breakfast at Tiffany’s was now lunching in Sodom, where the specialties included lightly fictionalized stories of lust, greed, envy and homicide. Unfortunately, many of the author’s pals, regulars at the restaurant that gave the story its name, recognized themselves. Capote suddenly found himself alone by the telephone; the once coveted party guest and confidant was now treated like a polluter of punch bowls. “What did they expect?” he asked at the time. “I’m a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?”

Probably. More to the point, what did Capote expect? Did this worldly virtuoso of American prose really believe he could tell and still kiss, or did he make a calculated career move? Capote was, after all, the literary imp who said, “A boy has to hustle his book,” and in a preface to Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, Random House Editor Joseph Fox notes that the author considered himself to be a master publicist.

If so, Capote’s mistake was to promote what he did not deliver. Until his death in 1984, he maintained that Answered Prayers was still in the works and even finished. An inventory of his literary effects failed to back the claim. Fox offers a number of admittedly shaky theories, among them that the manuscript was stolen by a former lover or that Capote stashed it in an undisclosed safe-deposit box or, according to one rumor, in a locker at the Los Angeles Greyhound Bus Depot. It is more likely, the editor adds, that he destroyed the missing chapters. Gerald Clarke, author of the upcoming biography Capote, points out that the writer set very high standards for himself. “He wanted to do for American high society what Proust had done for French society,” says Clarke, a TIME contributor.

A remembrance of things in the not-too-distant past suggests that Capote was in no physical or mental shape to fulfill his ambition. His introduction to Music for Chameleons (1980) refers to debilitating emotional problems and difficulties with alcohol and drugs. Social ostracism also left its mark, as did the strains of professional pride. Capote needed a success to match In Cold Blood, his so-called nonfiction novel published way back in 1966.

The central fiction about the hard-cover repackaging of Answered Prayers is the presumption that it is a novel, unfinished or otherwise. Rather, it is an act of merchandising that will divert attention from A Capote Reader, a generous collection of traditional fiction and imaginative journalism that invites renewed appreciation of one of the most gifted writers of his generation. “He writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm,” wrote Norman Mailer nearly 30 years ago. The early Southern stories have the delicate tinkle of glasses of iced tea; a touch sweet, perhaps, but clean and cool. “The Headless Hawk” (1946) is set in Manhattan and offers a sketch of the author as he may have seen himself: “He was not so handsome as he supposed, but handsome all the same. For his moderate height he was excellently proportioned; his hair was dark yellow, and his delicate, rather snub-nosed face had a fine, ruddy coloring.” Capote’s journalism — notably Handcarved Coffins — shows the influence of his fiction and what he called the “foxy rules of story making.”

Prayers could have easily been wrapped into the Reader. But only the chapter titled “Mojave” is included, because Capote decided it did not fit the novel’s scheme. Had he lived, he would have probably dropped “La Cote Basque” from Prayers as well. It is an independent contrivance stuck to the end of the book, where it pads about 40 pages onto an already slim offering.

What is left, “Unspoiled Monsters” and “Kate McCloud,” is shaped by the hard-boiled voice of the narrator, a bisexual prostitute named P.B. Jones who describes himself as a Hershey Bar whore (“there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for a nickel’s worth of chocolate”). Starting out in a St. Louis orphanage, Jones works his way up, first as a masseur in Miami, then as a would-be writer who massages the egos of the rich and famous in New York and Europe. There is a fetal plot that would have developed into a romantically justified kidnaping of a child from his father, a European industrialist.

Jones does not simply drop names; he hurls editions of Who’s Who. He is a compendium of tittle-tattle, from what the ladies found so impressive about Porfirio Rubirosa to what turned Tallulah on. Scenes of East Side literary salons contrast to the human litter of West 42 Street, innocence flirts with cynicism, and beauty is played off against corruption. Where invention beckons or libel laws counsel, there are fictional characters. Jones himself appears to be a perverse projection of a Capote who might have been.

Before his death, the author wrote about the difficult technical problems in composing Answered Prayers. It is hard to see what worried him. The narrative relies on one of the oldest and most effective devices, the story within the story. Incantations of Proust aside, Capote was on his way to a spectacular best seller, an irresistible piece of malicious mischief inspired by the traditional detective thriller and the National Enquirer.

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