When he was 8 years old, John Berendt so desperately wanted a watch that he wrote a miniature biography: “Right handed. One sister, Mother, Father. 3rd grade, Sumner School …. Gold ring on left hand. No watch.”

While Berendt’s bibliography officially begins in 1994 with “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” his best-selling, nonfiction classic about a murder committed by a wealthy Southern antiques dealer, this little biography is the writer’s first published piece. It appeared in the 1951 novel “Small World,” by his mother, Carol Deschere.

Berendt, 86, revisits his childhood obsession in “Wristwatch,” a new essay that appears in “Class Act: A Gentleman’s Guide to Dressing Well,” a collection from Vintage Books out this week that comprises 50 installments — some updated — of his Esquire column, “Classics.” From 1982 to 1994, “Classics” offered Berendt a space to analyze men’s wear and manners.

Plucked from The Harvard Lampoon right out of college by the Esquire editor Harold Hayes, the writer began his career at the men’s magazine when he was 21. Berendt admitted he initially felt his heart sink when Hayes bequeathed him with a fashion column. “That column was a chore,” he said.

And yet Berendt found a tantalizing story in every subject. The columns in “Classics” reveal gruesome and useful facts — for example, the skin of wild animals is better for gloves, because it’s more supple. He included debonair, noble characters like Benjamin Guggenheim, who sacrificed his spot on a lifeboat on the Titanic and then put on his white tie and tails to die “like a gentleman.” And he debunked myths, such as one about Bermuda shorts, which are not from Bermuda; another about the argyle pattern, which is not connected to the Argyle family (and they don’t like it when you ask).

“I hit on the light touch, the sardonic touch, to keep me going writing the column,” Berendt said. In doing so, he found the voice for “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” “I felt I knew how to get into any story now,” he explained. “To this day, I look for the entry point.”

The Entry Point

The “Classics” columns, where Berendt developed his style, reveal a deceptive talent for balancing the immediacy and verve of literary vamping with stealthy, authoritative analysis and gossipy history. Jennifer Barth, senior vice-president and editorial director at Vintage Books and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, who published “Class Act,” likens the entries to “piano-fingering exercises.” “He’s just got this wonderful, slightly old-school delivery and presence,” she said.

The entry point for Berendt is often the clothes. In fact, he was still writing his column when he first visited Savannah, Ga., in 1982 and moved there, three years later, to research the murder of a young man named Danny Hansford by the antiques dealer Jim Williams in 1981 and the four trials that ensued.

In the opening pages of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” Berendt turned his eye to out-of-place outfits, like Williams’s drab garb in his gorgeous house and Hansford’s T-shirt, which had the phrase “F— YOU,” emblazoned and uncensored. These details quickly conveyed to the reader that Williams was hard at work to maintain appearances and that Hansford was a threatening sexual provocateur.

When Berendt moved to Savannah, he met a local journalism student named Jim Morekis at a weekly party thrown by the writer’s travel agent — Morekis’s mother. The two discussed Savannah scandals and characters who would appear in Berendt’s book.

“Because he’s such a keen observer of human beings, he saw it for what it was, which was a great story,” Morekis said. “I think it was something he stumbled into.”

When it comes to reporting on others, Berendt believes in the power of a feather-light touch. “I don’t write anything negative about someone. There’s no need to,” he said. “I let them talk and say something terrible, which they said, but I don’t debase them.” His most important role was to make them seem as interesting as they were.

This approach evokes the original meaning of the statue photographed on the cover of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” Named “Bird Girl,” Sylvia Shaw’s statue depicts a girl holding identical bowls — bird feeders — one in each hand, referencing the scales weighing good and evil. But the bird feeders are meant to hold food and water, to nourish, not judge. Berendt regards his writing much the same way, even when he’s writing about watches, cardigans, rugby shirts and motorcycle jackets.

Time for Class

Berendt’s years of writing about ascots and pinstripe suits did not sway him toward flash or fussiness. He dresses with considerable restraint. He owns “at least 20” black Nautica T-shirts, which he often wears with a pair of Wrangler jeans and To Boot New York by Adam Derrick loafers, and the occasional sports coat.

An acolyte of confident simplicity, Berendt reminds us in “Class Act” that to wear a shirt without a collar under a coat is to declare victory in the “long-running struggle against the tyranny of neckties.”

He also boasts a spiffy collection of watches. He pointed out a Rolex and an Omega, though, Berendt said, he has no use for them anymore. “They all stopped working.”

In his essay “The Turtleneck,” Berendt frames turtlenecks as “the picture of masculine poise and arrogance.”

There are some vestiges of a courtly attitude in his style. In his closet, next to the turtlenecks, sit a cummerbund, a small heap of bow ties and a gentlemanly stack of handkerchiefs.

“Don’t blow your nose,” he instructed while pointing to them. “There are all kinds of tissues for that.” Berendt believes that handkerchiefs are just for “wiping up a spill or drying a lady’s tears.”

His longtime literary agent at William Morris Endeavor, Suzanne Gluck, who first met Berendt 33 years ago when she worked at the talent agency ICM, describes him as dapper. “It is an old-fashioned word,” she said, “but he’s dapper, unfailingly polite and incredibly funny.”

She recalls Berendt’s prelude to a dinner invitation at his rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan before he moved into his townhouse, where he has lived since 1999. “He said, ‘I would love to have you over for dinner just as soon as I can get the dining room repainted,’” Gluck said. “It had to be perfect.”

A Memorable Exit

Berendt’s graceful, airy townhouse on the Upper West Side is studded with “Midnight in the Garden” memorabilia, antiques and ephemera. While the original “Bird Girl” statue sat on a family plot in the Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, a replica now haunts a corner of his garden.

Hanging above Berendt’s office entryway is a very closely cropped realist painting of a man’s lower legs in white stockings, bright red breeches with gold buttons that was given to him by his subject, Jim Williams.

“Jim kept reattributing the painting to this painter or that painter,” said Berendt, a fact in keeping with his reporting of Williams’s famously shifting explanations of his interactions with Hansford. “I just care it was Jim Williams’s.”

One wall displays the original photograph from the book’s cover, along with one of himself with Clint Eastwood during the filming of his adaptation of “Midnight.” Berendt enjoys the ephemera that makes something intangible, like writing — his life’s work — more visible.

“Painters, artists have one problem: They create the painting, the drawing, and then it’s gone for good,” he said, gesturing widely to his art collection, which includes a Louise Bourgeois and an Andrew Wyeth.

“I would hate that,” he added. “Fortunately with books, I have the manuscript.”

He can hold it in his hand, basking in pride of his achievement, while also subtly checking the time on his new favorite watch, a Timex that cost $22.

Berendt also has a passion for gongs, of which he has three that he had commissioned from an artist he met named Aaron Taylor Kuffner in 2014, 15 years after he moved into his home. The gong, Berendt said, is a way to send people out in style. For a writer focused on the entry point, he values a memorable exit.