Capote

In cold blood by truman capote (1965)

In November 1959, four members of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, were brutally murdered in their own home. The book follows the investigation into the killings, the effect of the killings on family and close friends, and the month-and-a-half wanderings of the two murderers before their capture, trial, incarceration, and eventual execution.

In Cold Blood is the book that invented the true-crime genre of modern literature. Capote, already a successful fiction-writer, used his skills to tell this story. To set the scene, he began by describing Holcomb, a storybook high prairie town in the middle of nowhere USA. Then he introduced the Clutter family one-by-one, the parents and the two youngest of four children. Two older children had already grown up and moved away, saving their lives. As told by Capote, the Clutters were true salt-of-the-earth people: successful, independent, loving, accepting, religious, and good, respected citizens of the community. The author contrasted them with their killers: two poor, loser drifters who are in and out of jail in the decade before the crime. The two groups couldn’t be more opposite from each other.

Throughout the narrative, details are inserted about the killers’ lives to try to help the reader understand them better. Capote uses letters from family, statements from fellow inmates, lawyers, and various other people they encountered along the way. I think Capote was trying to humanize them but I also feel he stopped short of making them sympathetic. One of the men did indeed have a terrible family life while the other seemed to be a swaggering braggart. Killers and victims had never met before that night, so there was no good reason for the crime. The event is a true tragedy and Capote makes you feel it.

The story flows smoothly. The author builds up the world through description. The town, the family, and their killers were real. They had lives, personalities, thoughts, and desires. By the time the book gets to the actual crime, the killers and victims are three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood individuals. No one is a shallow, cookie-cutter caricature. These were real people and Capote did an excellent job making sure the reader doesn’t look at them as characters in a novel. I saw the Clutters through the eyes of those who knew them best and I was invested when the two story-lines finally collided. I could hear the sadness and horror in the memories of the daughter’s boyfriend, for example, when he tells how he visited the family just hours before their deaths.

Capote had a good sense of pacing and knew when to reveal details and when to hold off, pulling a big reveal when it suited the story best. It raises the narrative tension and the reader’s interest. This is where the author’s experience as a novelist is strongest. While a sad true story, In Cold Blood reads like a top-notch thriller and I could not put it down.

There are times, though, when Capote inserts so much detail that the narrative starts to bog down. Instead of summarizing or quoting short sections, Capote reprints entire letters and documents (and write-ups about those documents), some of which go on for pages. These are all supposed to help the reader understand the killers, but I also think Capote is trying to fill space when very happens in the actual timeline. I found these sections tedious.

According to the book, this crime wasn’t national news at all. It was really just a regional story, but something attracted Capote to write about it and in so doing invented a brand-new kind of literature. The last author I know of to do this was Edgar Allen Poe when he invented the detective story. With In Cold Blood, Capote created something completely original and it’s no surprise that a book as good as this inaugurated one of the most popular genres in literature.