‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote
In November 1959 the tiny village of Holcomb, Kansas was rocked by the savage and seemingly inexplicable murder of a well-liked local farmer and his family. Late one otherwise average mid-November night, Herb Clutter, the master of River Valley Farm, was brutally murdered along with his wife, Bonnie, and their two youngest children, fifteen-year-old Kenyon and sixteen-year-old Nancy. Holcomb, a tiny hamlet located high atop the wheat plains of western Kansas some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, was left baffled by the lack of clues and horrified by the callous, cold-blooded nature of the slaying. Who would want to kill the kindly, industrious Clutters? And, more importantly, why?
Enter Truman Capote and his probing account of the Clutter murder case, the very aptly titled In Cold Blood. First published in 1966 to a big ol’ storm of controversy, the book, which is frequently described as a non-fiction novel, is a thorough study not only of the murders themselves but also of their consequences. Perhaps most crucial to In Cold Blood is Capote’s in-depth examination of the two young killers, Dick Hicock and Perry Smith. While Capote takes care not to sympathise too deeply with Hicock and Smith - both of whom were convicted and eventually hanged at Kansas State Penitentiary in 1965 - he refrains from making the kind of rash judgements that most of us would in favour of exploring their respective backgrounds in an unbiased and factual manner. This lack of bias is, I assume, what gave rise to the aforementioned storm of controversy, for while Capote does not strictly side with the killers he does go to great pains to present them as damaged goods as opposed to heartless monsters.
First things first: In Cold Blood is not light reading, though I’m sure the title makes that quite clear. I do not mean to say that the book is complex or hard to follow, in fact it is pleasingly linear and clear, but the subject matter does not make for great escapism. This is not the point of the book, however, and as a true crime work In Cold Blood truly excels; it is often ranked among the best of the genre, along with The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer and Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson. Capote first learned of the Clutter case from a small feature in a New York City newspaper and, sufficiently intrigued, travelled immediately to Kansas to begin chronicling the fallout. In Cold Blood was therefore written in real-time, as the events unfolded, hence the brief gap in time between the execution of the perpetrators and the book’s publication.
In Cold Blood might not be enjoyable or particularly pleasant - Breakfast at Tiffany’s it ain’t - but it is remarkable nonetheless. The book begins with the calm before the storm; Capote paints an intimate picture of the Clutters and their idyllic life surrounded by horses and crops, cattle and pastures. It ends with some harrowing but brilliantly drawn scenes of Hicock and Smith heading to the gallows almost six years after their slaughter of the popular, hard-working family. As I read these sequences I was transported from Costa Coffee in Whitley Bay to that cavernous execution chamber in rural Kansas. I could very nearly hear the trap doors giving way, see the condemned men’s limbs twitching, smell all the death in the air. Yes, In Cold Blood is a non-fiction book, but its depiction of the American dream gone horribly awry is every bit as absorbing as that of many contemporary novels. If you can stomach some of the gorier details, you’ll find this is an essential read.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in May 2012.