In Cold Blood

I grew up in a small town in Kansas not unlike Holcomb where the Clutter family lived. Two men entered their home one November night in 1959 through an unlocked door. They bound and gagged the four family members in the house and then shot them at close range with a shotgun. The closest home was far enough away that the neighbors didn't hear the blasts. Nobody knew anything was amiss until friends showed up the next day to attend church with the family and were met with complete silence. The Clutters were dead.

I read this book for the first time in 8th grade. It was before the days of permission slips for controversial books....and I don't believe the district where I went to school ever banned a book. I had read every other book on show more the required reading list for my class and my teacher didn't know what to do with me. He finally decided to go rogue, and began handing me books from his personal library. The Mouse that Roared. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Invisible Man. The Grapes of Wrath. The Jungle. And....In Cold Blood.

I was profoundly affected by In Cold Blood. I was growing up....and learning the lesson that The World could be a very unsafe place. People could be hurt or even killed by complete strangers...for no reason. Good people....who never did anything harmful or wrong to others....could end brutally and unjustly. The idea first entered my head when John Lennon was gunned down in 1980 on the sidewalk outside his apartment in NYC by a stranger. I remember being dazed when I realized that a complete stranger could walk up, point a gun, and kill ANYBODY without any explanation or cause whatsoever. It shocked and scared me. Then a year later, I read In Cold Blood....it added to the awakening. A family asleep in their small town farm house.....good people. Kind people. They thought they were safe....safe enough to leave their doors unlocked at night. It was a mistake.

I have never slept a night in any house with an unlocked door since I read this book in 1982. Never.

It wasn't the description of the Clutters, their lives, their deaths that got to me.....it was more the fact that Truman Capote also described the killers in detail. Their lives. Their families. Their feelings, emotions, motivations. I found myself feeling sorry for them....abused children, hard lives, brutal lessons. I learned another adult lesson -- every human being is a person, even brutal murderers. There are reasons that people go down a dark path. This book taught me that not all children have happy, safe lives....some parents are abusive, some drink, use drugs, abandon their families. I lived a sheltered life in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. I had no idea that some kids had brutal lives. There is a space in time where every child grows up, starts to learn adult lessons and learns the truth about the world.....my awakening was filled with so many things. The Iran hostage crisis. The assassination of Anwar Sadat. John Lennon shot. Reagan shot. And....this book.

I want to watch the movie Capote, so I decided to revisit In Cold Blood first. I wondered if it would still bother me like it did when I first read it in 1981. I find this book had much more power when read by 13-year old me than it does several decades later. I have lived through so much, seen so much, read so much that it no longer shocks me that bad things happen to good people. I am no longer the innocent unworldly girl that didn't realize that people kill each other over silly things like money....or for no reason at all.

There are rumors that Capote took liberties with the facts while writing In Cold Blood. Even if he did, the book is still masterfully written and tells both sides of the story. The Clutters. Perry Smith. Richard Hickock.

I listened to the audio version of this book (Books on Tape) and let Scott Brick read me Capote's words. I found myself thinking the what-if questions -- what if those kids had lived and gone on to have wonderful lives....what would have happened to Smith and Hickock if they hadn't killed the Clutter family that night.....what if, what if, what if. So I guess my final thoughts are that yes...this book still affects me profoundly. But...differently. Instead of thoughts about the world not being safe and being surprised by that.....I found myself feeling sad that all of these lives were ruined, wasted, ended. Nancy and Kenyon Clutter would have done so much as adults, but they never got the chance. Herb and Bonnie Clutter would have lived out their days on their Kansas farm. Maybe Perry Smith and Richard Hickock wouldn't have been hanged in a Kansas prison. Lives wasted. For nothing. As a 50-year old grandmother, this book makes me sad.....as a 13-year old girl this book made me scared and shocked. Still emotional. Just different.

And that in itself makes me sad, too. I wish I was still shocked by a tale about an entire family gunned down in their own home. It says something about the world we live in that the story isn't shocking anymore.

Now, I'm going to go read a middle grade book about something magical or watch something on Disney channel to clear my head. And I'm going to check .... just to make sure .....that the front door is LOCKED.

Sigh. show less

"I think there must be something wrong with us, to go and do something like that."--Perry Smith

The progenitor of the true crime genre, Truman Capote's 1966 sensation In Cold Blood is a survey of the cultural and psychological landscape that provided the setting for one of the most senseless mass murders in U.S. history. Capote's mesmerizing account makes it almost possible to understand how two men could murder a family of four they had never met for less than fifty dollars.

The Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas was a paragon of the American dream, and their brutal murders by gunshot in the small hours of November 15, 1959 bred a terror in the farming community that continued to haunt it long after the murderers Richard "Dick" Hickock show more and Perry Smith were captured and eventually executed. Capote became intrigued with the story in 1959 before the murders had been solved, and along with his close friend Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960), spent the next six years compiling hundreds of hours of recorded interviews, thousands of pages of notes, and eventually a story of such far-reaching psychological insight, that the three motion pictures made about Capote's story are still overshadowed by the genius of the original work.

In fluid journalistic prose, Capote invites the reader to share in the deepest motivations of the people of Holcomb as he illustrates through their candid conversations Holcomb's Republican, Christian, and agricultural values, its starkly beautiful landscape, its down-to-earth and kindly people. He interweaves this moving pastiche with an equally detailed history of two men who subverted the social and legal systems over the span of their short lives until they found themselves at a cross-roads manufactured by fate, their violent tendencies, and the complex effect of their relationship on each other's capabilities. Capote's knockout achievement, through the murderers' conversations with each other, their letters to family members, their autobiographical statements, their interviews with journalists, is to provoke a deeper sympathy in the reader for actual killer Perry Smith and his possible insanity than for his dead-eyed partner in crime, sociopath Dick Hickock. I've never read an account that plumbs the depths of anti-social crime with such chilling profundity. show less

To put it bluntly, I think this book could be wildly shorter and still extremely impactful. But I think that of most books. This book succeeds in remaining fairly impartial and interesting. Sometimes it drags...sometimes it's thrilling and I can't put it down. The sensationalized idea of this book kept me going, if I'm being as honest as possible. I wanted to be in on this event and this writing that so many have talked about. It was also an assigned book and I've been trying to reach my reading goal. I found the story's beginning and end to be the most interesting sections of the story. I loved getting to know the Clutter family. Admittedly, it was interesting to get to know Dick and Perry as well. I am not usually sympathetic for show more murderers, but this book allows for a little wiggle room. It's awesome that we can understand why people do what they do, what drives them to heinous acts, and maybe, how we can prevent them. Though I do believe certain subsets of criminals are not deserving of too much sympathy, they are excellent displays of failures in American systems. We can address the orphaned, the abused, the privileged, and the mentally ill American in the same context. This book is a great starting point and beautifully written. show less

Whenever I heard In Cold Blood described as a "non-fiction novel", I always thought they meant it was merely novelistic—well-written, with fully-embodied characters and a sharp grasp of description and narrative. Having finally read the book, I realize I didn't take the label literally enough.

Let's back up. In 1959, the small town of Holcomb, KS saw four family members methodically murdered within their own home, with no clear suspects or motives in sight. Hundreds of false leads and one multi-state manhunt later, police caught the two suspects, successfully brought them to trial, and executed them in 1965. Capote covered the events for The New Yorker—publishing the first version of In Cold Blood there before gathering it up in book show more form.

The traditional approach would be a methodical study of the facts, perhaps woven into the narrative of the trial itself. But Capote decided to embellish, and we're lucky he did. From the start, there's scenes (re-)constructed and characterizations that Capote… well, a generous term would be to say he "extrapolated". I'm not inclined to give him that much credit.

Yet, in spite of the clearly-manufactured renderings of characters and events that are sketchy at best, the book WORKS. If you accept it as a novel that happens to comport with facts, it's a marvelous experience. It's a shame that Capote pulled off the move so well because it inspired many lesser writers to try and fail spectacularly at the same. (Example: goddamn Eric Larson in The Devil in the White City.)

Part of why it works so well at a novel is because Capote constructs the scenes, accidentally or not, to support many different readings. Clarissa read the book first, and was struck by how much Capote was clearly, uh, enraptured by Perry Smith. I couldn't stop noticing the women being sidelined and reduced throughout the novel, and coping in their own ways that even Capote may not have recognized at the time. I have no idea how much any of it comports with reality, and I don't particularly care either.

Cool book overall, one I liked a lot more than I expected, even with Clarissa's glowing recommendation and all the accumulated street cred in the last fifty years. show less

Here is what I wonder: what exactly did Truman Capote mean, when he came up with the title for this book? Obviously, the murders at the heart of the story were done in cold blood - but was he also thinking of the legislators and judges that murder the murderers? To the jurors who agreed that death was the only suitable punishment?
Or maybe, and this is pretty chilling to me, he might also have been referring to himself - to the lengths that he went to in order to elicit such a story from Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, to the sympathy he must have pretended. To his impatience each time the executions were delayed because by God, he had a book to publish.
Yikes.

"I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat." (pg. 237)

There's been some disquiet recently about the enduring public appetite for 'true crime' as entertainment, with Netflix – among others – pushing themselves into increasingly suspect commissions in order to meet the demand. But, in truth, this is nothing new. There has always been controversy surrounding the genre, a dilemma over whether the horrific suffering of real people should be packaged as, broadly speaking, 'entertainment'. This is evident even in one of the earliest – and finest – examples of the genre: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

It's a brilliant book, no doubt about it. show more Originally serialized in The New Yorker while the killers were still on death row, it is a stellar piece of narrative journalism and one which pioneered a new, commercially-successful recipe for 'true crime'. There's never any real doubt about who the killers are, no grand mystery or plot twist; instead, the winning formula involves the writer – a technically-excellent writer – gradually revealing the details of the murders, the motivations of the killers, and the investigation over the course of his narrative. It grips. Tightly. And it's thrilling; not only in the assured way Capote unfolds the crimes but in the way that, I imagine, the lions mauling Christians was thrilling to the audience in the Colosseum. There's an edge – which should make anyone feel slightly queasy – about knowing this wasn't a story, that this was real.

I purposely avoided googling the crime until after I had finished In Cold Blood – no skipping ahead and, importantly, no photographs, either of the criminals or their victims. There was only what Truman Capote could conjure for me with his words – and, by God, he can. But I have to say, once I did finish the book and got to googling, the spell was somewhat broken. I felt a bit of shame at having enjoyed the book after seeing what the Clutter family really looked like; ordinary people who, through no will of their own, had undergone a brutal ordeal and had, let's be honest, suffered the further indignity of being reduced to performing for the reader. I'm not resolved about these feelings – and maybe I'm just a hypocrite – but there's always that shadow lurking about a piece of 'true crime', something that makes it seem shabby and inappropriate, for all that it is vivid and intoxicating.

And the googling also brought forward two other spell-breakers: the photographs of the criminals and the written criticisms of Capote's inaccuracies in the story. It makes sense, sometimes, that Capote would embellish or invent in order to move the story along, unethical as this may sometimes appear. But the googled photographs of the two criminals cut right through one of Capote's successes in In Cold Blood: sympathy (or at least reluctant empathy) with the murderers. The book is fascinated with its two killers, particularly the 'gentle', 'sensitive' Perry Smith, but the photographs of these warped individuals (Dick Hickock being the other) brought me back down to earth. It's one thing to understand a killer's motivations, his journey and his past, but it's quite another to be taken in. Capote appears, at times, taken in, and his enthusiasm and his writing ability helps ensure the reader is taken in too. But in the cold light of day, separated from Capote's deceptively simple prose, those photographs remind us that these men coldly and brutally murdered an entire family, who were innocent and terrified and pleading for their lives. The reader wrestles with how the crime appals as much as it enthrals.

This is not to say that Capote is dishonest in his approach. The discomfort, the "sorrow and profound fatigue" that we share with the investigators when the criminals recount the details of their crime (pg. 239), are part of the deal with the devil we make when we seek entertainment in 'true crime'. Capote himself is even-handed (though not exactly neutral), and we find ourselves sharing the view of the criminals that one detective's wife offers: she is "reminded of a childhood incident – of a bobcat she'd once seen caught in a trap, and of how, though she'd wanted to release it, the cat's eyes, radiant with pain and hatred, had drained her of pity and filled her with terror" (pg. 157). The author's hand might well be involved here, for it is a perfect analogy. That hand is certainly involved when Capote delivers the final scene of the book. This scene is invented but, after the brutality of the previous 300 pages, it's a perfectly measured piece of relief and gentleness.

Perhaps the most creditable achievement of In Cold Blood is to be found in the unease it generates. Capote does not shy away from the messiness and uses the disquiet – the taboo, if you will – of discussing the crime to really make us reflect on the nature of crime and criminals. Like that bobcat in the trap mentioned above, we want to relieve but we also know that there is rage in the world that cannot be controlled, and certainly not by good or noble intentions. The Clutters were good people, by all accounts, but it didn't prevent cruel chance from destroying them in a horrible, drawn-out way. Mercy for the killers wouldn't have helped them, and certainly wouldn't have helped any future victims. Similarly, the fact that I feel unease about reading this, and feel a desire to be noble about it, doesn't prevent me from reading it as salaciously as everyone else.

For better or worse, Capote uses these emotions, dilemmas and taboos as fuel. The cracks in our worldview are where he finds his most potent material. When the killers point out that they're not the only killers in the courtroom, seeing as the jurors are contemplating the death penalty, there's some truth in it, however self-pitying. Hanging them is "pretty goddam cold-blooded too" (pg. 298) – perhaps an intentional counterpoint to Capote's chosen title. When the detectives, the jurors, the community – and we, the reader – want to hear the "morbid details from the killer's own terrible lips" (pg. 260), there's a sort of cold-bloodedness in this desire too. These two killers belong in hell, if there is one, but the reader still feels an unease at sending them there, at being the one to sift through the gory detail and judging them – and worse, at enjoying it. All the moreso because the killers are very much human and relatable; their evil cannot be attributed to a cosmic force. One of Capote's great successes in the book is in demonstrating how "the crime would not have occurred except for a certain frictional interplay between the perpetrators" (pg. 290). Horrible chance and an even more horrible – and entirely human – accumulation of malice meant the innocent Clutter family had to pay.

And, for the reader, this is disturbing. When one local resident suggests that the most appropriate punishment for the two murderers is to "be locked in the same cell for the rest of their lives. Never allowed any visitors. Just sit there staring at each other till the day they die" (pg. 241), he unwittingly hits upon why crimes like this one are so frightening and so compelling at the same time. There's no more terrifying fate than having to face up to reality. Monsters can be dismissed, defended against, our fears of them rationalized; human beings, unfortunately, have to be dealt with. When one of the killers converses with the bound, frightened young Nancy Clutter ("really nice… Said next to dancing what she liked best was to gallop a horse, so I mentioned my mother had been a champion rodeo rider" (pg. 236)), it's almost obscene that these two people are in the same room, that their two worlds have converged, and that the wrong one has the power of life and death over the other. The thrill of In Cold Blood lasts only as a memory; the enduring sense after reading the book is one of profound unease. If the entertainment of 'true crime' really is a deal with the devil, Capote is on hand to make sure we pay up. show less

Of course, regardless of how he did it and how much the book really reflects what happened, this is a wonderfully written and engrossing piece of fiction/non-fiction. It makes you feel hopeful and hopeless at the same time, and does a nice job of making both the "good" and "evil" characters complex and human, without making excuses for the murders or making the victims into saints. If you (like me) somehow got through life without reading this before, you should probably pick it up soon.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2016/01/in-cold-blood-by-truman-capote-1966.html ]