In Cold Blood

As a big true crime reader for almost 30 years, I don't know why it's taken me so long to get to the book that has so heavily influenced the genre. It's extremely well-written, well-researched, and reads like a thriller novel. Very dark, and even disturbing at times, when in the murderers' POV, it's nonetheless a gripping book. It takes you through the crime, manhunt, arrest, and trial, but not in a "facts and figures" sort of way, but rather in a very human way. This one is not for the faint of heart, but it is an incredibly moving narrative.

Truman Capote brings to life this horrific murder. Many of the conversations were fictionalized, but by and large I think they move the story forward without detracting from the validity of the crime. Capote captured the character of not only the victims, but also the perpetrators. The backstories on Perry Smith an Dick Hickock were especially interesting, their upbringing and the psychology. Smith captured my attention the most, perhaps because I was most horrified by him. And I loved how Capote intertwined actual letters and other artifacts relevant to the case. For instance, I found the article "Murder Without Apparent Motive--A study in Personality Disorganization" completely fascinating and very disturbing. Here are a few thoughts show more and outtakes to give the reader a feel for what's in store:

I was duly impressed by Perry Smith's vocabulary: Thanatoid=deathlike; amerce=punishment, amount fixed by court; facinorous=atrociously wicked; hagiophobia=a morbid fear of holy places, etc. And his "diary" which really was just a place he kept favorite quotes and interesting tidbits of information. Whew!! The man was smart, but only book smart. He was morally bankrupt. I am horrified that his upbringing could have so warped him that he could go on to kill the Clutter family, especially when the prime instigator, Dick Hickock, seemed to back off the crime.

"The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightening. Except for one thing: they had experienced terror, they had suffered." (Dewey)

And Perry's response? "'Am I sorry? If that's what you mean--I'm not. I don't feel anything about it. I wish I did. But nothing about it bothers me a bit. half an hour after it happened, Dick was making jokes and I was laughing at them. Maybe we are not human. I'm human enough to feel sorry for myself. Sorry I can't walk out of here when you walk out. But that's all.' Sullivan could scarcely credit so detached an attitude; Perry was confused, mistaken, it was not possible for any man to be that devoid of conscience or compassion."

A very compelling, if chilling read. Recommended. show less

A great read with a well-deserved reputation. The events of this book took place in the decade before I was born, but it seems older than that. Capote captures the flavor of Kansan language used by these characters, and the mentality as well. I certainly felt like I got in the heads of both murderers. Dick was a piece of work, probably brain injured in his car crash and damaged goods thereafter. But Perry is a real tragedy. Hearing about his upbringing made you really feel for him, cold blooded killer though he was. There is a sensitive, artistic side to him that, unfortunately, his temper would not allow to win.

Three are lots of interesting details discovered throughout the book. The investigators caught a lot of lucky breaks, I'd say. show more Capote doesn't look away at the most horrific moments either, so the book isn't sanitized for the reader of 1965. Kansas in this period is a little Stepford Wives-ish, a little apple pie American that I find both nostalgic and annoying. Capote is a man of his time and doesn't really notice it much as a narrator, but I was expecting a little more social commentary as a gay man. Regardless, the book did not disappoint. 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.

DNF'd 2024

I got big issues with this.

Capote's innovation to overlay fiction techniques onto nonfiction sounds good on paper but in reality lacks integrity, beginning here: "As Mr. Clutter contemplated this superior specimen of the season, he was joined by a part-collie mongrel."

Who told Capote that Mr. Clutter was contemplating the Indian summer? The dog? And just like that, I was snapped out of the narrative into distrust. I can't suspend my disbelief because it's a true story. And I can't believe what I'm reading when it's the inconsequential thoughts of a real, now dead man. Apparently Capote thought this was a clever innovation; he gave it the name of "non-fiction novel."

I see that as intrinsically problematic. It's like AI. Like show more gaslighting. Like Trump—just look at the huge effect that's had. Deceptive mixing of the truth and lies can do harm, even if it isn't your intention to harm.

Fiction inserted into non-fiction is a lie. Adding literary style is one thing (aka James Elroy), but fudging the truth, well that's not the same thing.

Capote's deluded mix in the service of an artistic "break-through" was dangerous: psychologically to Smith and Perry who believed they had a friend who also didn't want to see them to hang, to the Swans who told him their deepest secrets in confidence then outed to all of NYC, and to Harper Lee who gave him the cover of normalcy for Holcomb but got bupkis from her friend who lied about her contributions and couldn't be bothered about her own successes. His Art was his only moral compass.

The ultimate danger was to Capote himself, the result of his betrayals for Art are he died shut out of the high society he so craved and lived the last years high as a kite.

So why am I still reading this hot mess "classic" that I'm finding repugnant?

I'm not any more. DNF 2024 show less

"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

I have mixed feelings about In Cold Blood. On one hand, this is a book that pioneered interesting and elegantly-crafted non-fiction. Although there are moments when the story gets bogged down by legal or court details, for the most part In Cold Blood reads like a novel. On the other hand, the success of this book ushered in an era of over-sensationalized true crime and non-fiction works that speculated and outright lied about what really happened.

On its own, In Cold Blood is certainly riveting and, at times, gorgeously rendered. Some of the scenes come across as masterfully written fiction; of course, if you research the book after reading it, you'll find that some actually were fiction. Veracity aside, I was intrigued and disgusted by show more the Clutter family crime. I think having always lived in Kansas (though I'd never heard of Holcomb prior to reading this book) helped keep my interest. As I mentioned earlier, the story does drag from time to time, but not horribly so. Also, I'd have liked to have known more about Harper Lee's involvement, but I guess that's material for a different book. show less