'In Cold Blood' by Truman Capote

‘In Cold Blood’ sets a precedent as a seminal piece of non-fiction drama through the thorough and dangerous investigation carried out by journalist Truman Capote.  The book follows Capote’s own exploration into the savage murders of the Clutter family, killed in the small, quiet town of Holcomb, Kansas, in November 1959.

With no clues and no apparent motive for an horrendous crime in which the parents and two children of the same family were tied up and shot in the head with a shotgun from point blank range, the case was investigated but subsequently closed following a lack of information. Capote’s ceaseless probing into the case eventually brought the two perpetrators to justice five years later, and consequently two men were hanged at a gallows at Kansas State Penitentiary in 1964.  

This mesmerising book is a true masterpiece in non-fiction storytelling and Capotes attention to detail brings the peaceful, loving, Clutter family to life in a truly harrowing way. Through countless interviews, diary entries and obsessive detail collection, Capote is able to reconstruct the Clutter family and the lives of the two murderers. He recounts that 16 year old Nancy Clutter would religiously comb her hair one hundred times each night, the scratches and scuffs of Dick Hickock’s ominous black ’49 Chevrolet sedan and the shocking red blood on the walls of the Clutter house.

‘In Cold Blood’ works so well contrasting the happiness and innocence of the Clutter family with their eventual sad and disturbing demise but also shows the pathetic and miserable murderers in a way that it is difficult not to be moved by Capote’s poignancy. The portrayal of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith is interesting in that the two drifters were not quickly condemned as vicious killers but truly represented as the confused, violent and disturbed characters that they were. This is perfectly pieced together and relived with Smith’s desperate attempts to cover his tracks from his father and the old man’s sad realisation, when it dawns on him what his son has done.



Truman Capote

The distressing case became an obsession for 35 year old Capote who himself was so disturbed by ot that he felt he must make sense of the brutal killers and the mind-set of the two men. Eventually interviewing the men regularly, his final discussion with Perry came on the day of his execution, five years after the robbery that went wrong and ended in homicide. The route to Mexico and eventually back into the US that the men took after the crime is captivatingly written but also highlights the pathetic, miserable and vulnerable lives that the men led. They initially both claimed the murder was carried out by the other, but the truth eventually emerges after some exploration by Capote that summarises a book that went past the details of a thorough police and FBI investigation, and into the lives of a small town community in rural Kansas and the minds of two killers; one dangerously disturbed and the other weak and pathetic.