In Cold Blood (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

Listening to this on audiobook is like hearing the First True Crime Podcast. The tension with the slow reveal of what happened, the focus on the criminals as much as the victims or the police tracking down the criminals, the homoerotic undercurrent, it set the standard for much of what was to come.

This book stays with you, it makes a strange case for both the need to keep certain people away from the general public forever but also why capital punishment isn't the answer.

The first time I read this I remember expecting more in terms of motivation and connections between the victims and the criminals and feeling a little let down. This time around I appreciate that it's that very lack of connection that makes the aftermath of the town so fascinating to focus on.

Also it's hilarious how much more interesting a character Perry was out of the two criminals, Truman does his best to seem even handed, keep Dick in the picture, but basic-ass Dick never stood a chance.

I only rarely pick up true crime books these days because I devoured so many not-so-well-written examples as a teenager that they quite put me off attempting any more. That said, a friend offering to lend me his vintage edition of In Cold Blood together with it being a Classic and of the right era to complete my current Decade Challenge - how could I turn it down?

Capote certainly did his research for In Cold Blood. I wasn't expecting such an incredible depth and breadth of information, and especially not for so many pages of small font (it's an old book) to grip my attention for hours. This is excellent reportage journalism of a kind I feel we rarely encounter any more (although I was strongly reminded of One Of Us: Anders Breivik by Asne Seierstad which I would happily recommend to other fans of In Cold Blood. Truman not only recounts in graphic detail the events immediately surrounding the Clutter murders, but also goes back in time to explore the culprits' pasts and follows the Dewey investigation until the ultimate conclusion of the court case. Extensive recounting of interviews and statements allowed me to feel as though I got a good sense of Holcomb town and of the main people involved in the infamous murder. In thinking about the murderers themselves, I am glad to be separated from them by thousands of miles and several decades. That kind of senseless violence is truly chilling to contemplate and I could understand how it was so destructive to the small town community, especially during the weeks in which many Holcomb inhabitants were looking to cast blame towards each other.

I appreciated Capote's level headedness throughout this book. He avoids sensationalist gimmicks and I never felt as though I was being manipulated towards a particular point of view in the way that present-day journalists usually do. Instead In Cold Blood came across to me as a masterpiece of impartial factual reporting which I am glad to have read.

I quite liked the book. It's well written because it lacks voyeurism, provides enough space for the victims and accomplishes to give an understanding why people become murder.
BUT, after finishing I read that witnesses were misquoted by Capote and what is even worse, entire events were made up. So it's fiction and not non-fiction as it claims. Therefore only 2 of 5 from me.

Nevertheless, Capote spent six years of work on this novel, spoke a lot with the murderers and many wittnesses. So I assume many things are accurate and hold the earlier mentioned premise. There were many things I found interesting in the novel. For example it showed that even in the 60s there was some awareness of how early childhood trauma affects the life of people. I honestly did not expect that. Next, the process, if it really happened as it is described in the book, was really kafkaesque. The death penalty seemed to be decided before it even started. The psychiatrist who prepared a report about their mental state was only able to answer with 'yes' or 'no'. Yeah ok... Why does any trial of the US feel like a complete sh*tshow all the time?
Other things that stuck out to me were the completely randomness of the murder. It seemed like a bad coincidence and absurd. I got the feeling if they hadn't murdered the Clutters, maybe it would have been another group of people on another random day. And last thing is that this felt like a true crime series from Netflix, a genre which Capote had somehow innovated/made popular with this book.

There's a reason you've probably heard of this book even if you haven't read it, and the fact that it has, at the time of writing, 580,000 ratings on GoodReads probably underlines it - it's a classic, apparently. But, like a classic car, there are some bits that don't work too well - with some overly florid language, particularly at the beginning of the book, almost signalling that Capote is trying too hard.

Occasionally, you get the feeling that he's being paid by the word. Perhaps he was: long excerpts from letters and documents pop up every so often that do little to aid the story or to develop character.

The pacing of the story is a little odd, too, with some parts whisking by, and other parts dwelled on with glacial slowness. But then, I'm not a literature teacher, and if I were, I'd probably point out why he's doing it. But I'm not, so I don't know why.

I later discover, after reading, that it first appeared in the New Yorker as a serial, published over four editions. That might explain some of the above - a requirement to reach a natural break-point for publication, perhaps.

In any case - it's fine, it's a good read, it's told well and with flair, if slightly too much flair in some cases. It's a good true crime thriller, in the same way as others which have followed. But personally I don't think it's worth full marks here - enjoyable though it was.

For people who enjoy true crime, this often feels like a must read because of it being so commonplace in popular culture; the crimes are more than a half-century old, they took place in such a sleepy part of the United States, and yet so many people are well-aware of this book and Truman Capote. It's intriguing how important this book was.

But, for today, it has some other interesting aspects. There are so many pieces of it that remind me of arguments taking place in a modern context. Capote probably wasn't aware of what would become interesting 50 or so years later. The descriptions of Dick Hickock by people in the community that he grew up in. His parents describe him as a "good boy," trying to say that it was the fault of a car accident that he became what he was; you see a few mentions of people in the community saying that Dick was never good, but they never would press charges for the respect they had for his parents. Perry never gets that treatment; you never see that.

There is also a great indication of how we've developed a discourse regarding mental health in the legal profession. That's an interesting aspect of the history that provides an interesting context of how we've gotten to where we are.

As with many seminal works that pioneered a genre, this book is... fine. Capote was one of the first to write a non-fiction novelization of "true crime" events, and the genre is now well-established and unremarkable, but this book was the original "Serial."

Capote extensively interviewed people who knew the family and the murderers, and much of the story does have an unsensational ring of truth. The murderers aren't the classic waxed-mustache villains with a dastardly smile; they're not insane perverts in the modern trope: they're amoral, asocial men of the type which humanity has always had among us, and is labeling now as "incels," who have a palpable feeling of their own superiority and believe society owes them.

One of the most striking parts of this book to me were the statistics on incarceration by race. "The present warden, Sherman H. Crouse, keeps a chart which lists the daily total according to race (for example, White 1405, Colored 360, mexicans 12, Indians 6)." page 559. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons' website as of Sat, 15 Feb 2020, of the 173k federal inmates in their custody, 37.5% are Black. If we were to take both figures as representative of both time periods, then over 60 years Black inmates have increased by 86%!

Capote comments on the time it takes for someone to go through the justice system, from conviction to paying the ultimate price, criticizing how easy it is to prolong the appeals process. It's an easy target, but Capote doesn't explicitly condemn capital punishment or suggest a better process. Something to chew on, as the justice system has only gotten worse given time and inattention.

In 1959 a farmer from Holcomb, Kansas was killed along with his wife and two of his four children by a couple of two-bit thieves. This brutal crime spawned a desperate search for the killers who left bloody footprints at the murder scene. From petty crime to mass murder, In Cold Blood tells the story from murder to the gallows where they were executed by hanging.

In the Truman Capote literary masterpiece, it is easy to consider In Cold Blood a crime novel; it has shades of pulp and southern gothic throughout the book. However this journalistic investigation has often been cited as the first and best example of the non-fiction genre known as true crime. While there have been true crime books before In Cold Blood, this book did redefine the genre. Capote likes to call his book a non-fiction novel which he defined in an interview with The New Your Times as “a narrative form that employed all techniques of fictional art, but was nevertheless immaculately factual”.

However this is not just a book about the brutal murder of the Clutter family; we also get a Capote’s depiction of rural America. Outside the details of the crime, the author paints a descriptive backdrop of Kansas, the way he sees it. Religion, masculinity, femininity, the nuclear family and small town communities all play a big part in developing the scene. When he talks about the crime, the reader gets to explore the psychological motivations of murder and awaiting execution.

There is the issue of mental illness that needs to be explored when talking about In Cold Blood. It is almost like Truman Capote wants to challenge the reader to consider if Perry and Dick suffered from an untreated mental illness. There are shade of delusional, depression, schizophrenia and a sociopathic personality that comes through when talking about these two people but as this is 1959 I expect no psychological consult or treatment were given to these men; the court rejected the request.

I expected a true crime book but I feel like In Cold Blood was trying to do something similar to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I was very impressed with this book and I feel like Capote may have ruined true crime and even narrative non-fiction for the rest of the authors in these genres. Capote’s investigational skills and mastery over the written word is what makes this book a masterpiece.

This review originally appeared on my blog: literary-exploration.com/2014/08/30/in-cold-blood-by-truman-capote/

This book will always be one of my top 10, it was a turning point in my reading life, I went from reading easy books by Stephen King, Dean Koontz and James Herbert and started exploring the literary world. Because of this book I fell in love with Bukowski's stories.

So much of this it is just a recount of what a few people did in a day before their murder, nothing they do is interesting but it has been written so well you are drawn into their daily lives and every single moment has you on the edge of your seat, probably because you already know how things are going to end, I must have a very morbid interest in things.

Some people might be put off by the subject matter but it is not about the crime itself but about the lead up to the murders and why it happened. One of the best true crime books out there.