In Cold Blood
author: Truman Capote
name: Paul
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at: 2012/02/19
date added: 2012/02/20
shelves: non-fiction, true-crime
review:
Works of literature that are terribly intimate seem often to demand a first person voice. Likewise, journalistic endeavors of any depth and/or breadth seem to frequently (at least in the last twenty years or so that I’ve been reading them as contemporary) involve self-reference by the writer. It creates a certain expectation, somehow. Which is why I was shocked to note that except for a few third person, oblique references to “journalists,” Truman Capote never self-inserts into his non-fiction novel.
In Cold Blood is a wide-ranging examination of the shotgun murders of the Clutter family in Kansas in 1959. Capote finds a tonal balance between authentic, authoritative reporting and suspenseful thriller pacing that really works considering the amount of detail on display. The structure bounces back and forth between the Clutters, the perpetrators (Perry Smith and Dick Hickock), and the investigative unit assigned to track down the killers which creates a genuine tension throughout, or at least up until the criminals are captured in Las Vegas. Once Smith and Hickock are in custody the book becomes a legal procedural, cataloging the questioning, the pre-trial, the courtroom drama and finally the sentencing and execution of the convicted. Capote’s lively and absorbing prose paints a landscape that draws the reader back in time and does not flinch away from trying in an organic way to illuminate the nature not only of the crime itself but of the men who committed it.
But I think where In Cold Blood is most effective is in giving more than just a sense of the anti-heroes, because In Cold Blood is about the way a crime that a newspaper might shorthand into something glib like “senseless” is really something much more complex, and much further reaching than just the most obvious victims. Capote works hard to humanize the victims, the perpetrators, the lawmen, the judicial system and even the small community that is left to cope with the aftermath. Few stones are ever unturned to try and display the scope at which two troubled young men who executed an innocent family just to leave no witnesses behind in a failed robbery operated.
What’s masterful about the way Capote handles this is that he doesn’t do so by waxing into meta-narrative or by hypothesizing in his own voice, he uses a devotional level of research and the careful orchestration of facts and opinions gathered by the many actors involved (criminal psychologists from the trial and appeals processes, community members and, most significantly, Perry and Hickock themselves) to let it rise up through the narrative naturally.
I did get a bit of the sense that the book may have been more shocking or extreme at the time of its publication. In Cold Blood doesn’t really feel like it pulls many punches but sensationalized modern media feels like it has taken the sting out of the tone of this book in the past thirty-five or forty years. A quadruple homicide/home invasion is still a dreadful tragedy but I suspect a modern writer might linger on some of the more medical details, gore and sexual elements (particularly Hickock’s predilection for younger girls represented in the central event as the Clutter’s daughter, Nancy). Even if the initial publication was unflinching in its depiction of a horrible and brutal act, I appreciated that Capote doesn’t seem ghoulish in his depiction of it which is a characteristic that modern true crime novels I’ve attempted seem to have in common.
Overall, In Cold Blood is a very thorough and spectacularly executed piece of narrative nonfiction. There is a bit of a sense of quaintness in some of the procedural and criminology aspects that even casual exposure to modern psychology and criminal justice would render a bit primitive, but its a book that lingers in memory and deserves to be read.