In Cold Blood – Truman Capote, 1966 ★★★★½

Tru Grit

Famous for mainstreaming two genres, true crime and New Journalism, In Cold Blood is perhaps even more remarkable for how it turned a squalid, non-mysterious quadruple murder into a rare book-driven sensation that remains as powerful over fifty years on.

Truman Capote called his best-known work a “non-fiction novel,” which sets off all sorts of warning bells but sums up its approach: an immersive mix of multiple points-of-view, shifting narratives, even verb tenses.

The more I read it, the more gutted I feel for the victims and the rest of humanity. Then I want to read it all over again.

Capote opens on the sleepy farming community of Holcomb, Kansas early one Sunday in November 1959, where nothing much happens and everyone likes it that way: “At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them – four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.”

The Clutter family in the living room of their farmhouse. The two older girls seen here, Eveanna and Beverly, had moved away from Holcomb by the time of the murders. Image from https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/cold-blooded-new-docuseries-picks-up-where-in-cold-blood-left-off-118056/.

The four they found the next morning were the Clutter family: Herbert, Bonnie, and teenage daughter and son Nancy and Kenyon. The other two lives eventually ended were the perpetrators, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, malcontents with long criminal records and a taste for violence.

Why did they do it? Smith just shrugs: “They never hurt me. Like other people. Like people have all my life. Maybe it’s just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it.”

Capote doesn’t deny the killers were vicious. But by filling out their portraits with streaks of recognizable humanity, he challenges existing conventions regarding criminal justice and suggests any law worth a damn is one that operates more from mercy than vengeance.

Capote quotes Hickock to this effect: “I believe in hanging. Just so long as I’m not the one being hanged.”

Author Truman Capote poses in the Clutter living room. In a 2017 documentary, "Cold Blooded," it is revealed the surviving Clutters were angered by this visit as well as the book in general. Image from https://schmoozed.com/in-cold-blood-murder-house-in-holcomb-kansas/, which has a great selection of images.

The capital punishment argument is a long and raw one. I don’t want to get into it too much except to say I support it and believe Perry Smith and Dick Hickock poster children to that end. But Capote, who clearly didn’t believe in capital punishment and all but says so here, makes his points quietly while focusing on the crime and its effect:

The four coffins, which quite filled the small, flower-crowded parlor, were to be sealed at the funeral services – very understandably, for despite the care taken with the appearance of the victims, the effect achieved was disquieting. Nancy wore her dress of cherry-red velvet, her brother a bright plaid shirt; the parents were more sedately attired, Mr. Clutter in navy-blue flannel, his wife in navy-blue crepe; and – and it was this, especially, that lent the scene an awful aura – the head of each was completely encased in cotton, a swollen cotton twice the size of an ordinary blown-up balloon, and the cotton, because it had been sprayed with a glossy substance, twinkled like Christmas-tree snow.

Later, much later, we actually see the crime take place, in the form of depositions given by Smith and Hickock. It is a harrowing sequence, told in bursts of descriptive color that accentuate the suddenness of the horror even as it pulls back from the goriest details. What you imagine is worse than what’s on the page.

Dick Hickock (at left) and Perry Smith in custody. Both maintained in their depositions that Hickock watched while Smith did the killing. Hickock complained: "Many a man has killed and never seen the inside of a death cell. And I never killed anybody." Image from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/04/in-cold-blood-florida-crime.

A notable thing about In Cold Blood is how much of a departure it represented. Capote had built his fame on neurotic spinsters and elegant soirees. He didn’t have the background for this kind of work. But not only did he succeed writing crime, he found a way of incorporating descriptive color and offbeat tangents into what is still a very clear, even flat narrative of who did what to whom.

Did he take liberties in the process? Yes. He invented conversations and described at least one relationship with a captor in a way that reflected better on Smith’s humanity than the facts warranted. He also pushes the heroic qualities of lead investigator, Alvin Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, as Dewey was a key Capote source.

The conversations recreated between Smith and Hickock seem at times enhanced for effect, and to float Capote’s main thesis that the pair were both drawn together and acted as they did because of their status as cultural outsiders.

Capote relates their dialogue stenographically:

“There’s got to be something wrong with somebody who’d do a thing like that,” Perry said.

“Deal me out, baby,” Dick said. “I’m a normal.”

Harper Lee assisted Capote researching In Cold Blood in the months before the publication of her own famous book, To Kill A Mockingbird. A childhood friend, Lee helped Capote both with interviews and insights, but the two were estranged by the time of Capote's death in 1984. Image from https://abcnews.go.com/US/inside-harper-lee-truman-capotes-friendship/story?id=37065674. 

I don’t think Capote was soft on Smith because the two were both homosexuals, outsiders, displaced children, short of stature, or whatever. I think Capote found him a fascinating character and a hook for his book. Which he is. The more we learn about Smith’s peripatetic upbringing, his sad dreams, and his spiky relationship with the nastier but less brutish Hickock, the more we feel his humanity.

In the main, however criticized in its factual particulars, Capote’s story holds up. The killers were undone by a combination of massive stupidity and incredible luck, and left behind scars that would never heal.

Theirs was a strange relationship; Hickock as instigator and Smith as assassin. Smith explains: “None of it would have happened without him, in a way it was mostly his fault, but the fact remains I’m the one who killed them.”

The motive for the crime was never clear, not even to the criminals. A cellmate of Hickock had briefly worked on the Clutters’ farm and told him of a safe Mr. Clutter had in his office. In fact Mr. Clutter had no safe, and kept his money in the bank. The killers made off with less than fifty dollars (“ten dollars a life” as a prosecutor put it), a portable radio, and a pair of binoculars. Yet they were laughing all the way on the drive to Hickock’s home.

According to Smith, Hickock’s real reason for picking the Clutters was to rape the daughter. This never happened as Smith stopped it. In Smith’s telling, Hickock was more of a sadistic hanger-on than an actual murderer, egging on his companion with wild talk about “blasting hair all over them walls.”

A first-edition dust jacket of In Cold Blood. Originally published in The New Yorker in several parts beginning in September, 1965, the book impressed most critics but also generated some backlash. Tom Wolfe later dubbed it "pornoviolence." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Cold_Blood#Publication.

One challenge reading In Cold Blood is squaring Capote’s portrait of Smith as sensitive misfit who tears up listening to music with someone who not only kills the Clutters but is willing to do so again when a salesman picks up the hitchhiking pair on the road home from Mexico.

“The rights of other people mean nothing to Perry,” Smith’s own sister tells Capote. “He has no respect for anyone.”

In response, Smith notes he was sorry his sister wasn’t at the Clutter house that night. Sweet guy, huh?

Making you like Perry Smith is impossible. Making you care about him is at the core of Capote’s triumph. The depressing finality of realizing you are a loser, and that no one really cares, proves for Smith to be debilitating, infuriating, finally deadly.

According to a recent article, the former Clutter home still exists in much the same form as it did in 1959, with kitchen cabinetry built by Herb Clutter. Trespassers are not welcome. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clutter_home_Holcomb,_KS_March_2009.jpg.

Capote’s New Journalism techniques can be infuriating. Right at the start, we find ourselves reading inner thoughts of the Clutters on the last quiet day of their lives. Capote presents their inner selves in questionably transparent form:

Nancy had been reasonable – at any rate, she had not argued – and now, before saying good night, Mr. Clutter secured from her a promise to begin a gradual breaking off with Bobby [her boyfriend].

It must be said that in writing these and other like items, Capote relied on extensive interviews conducted around Holcomb, as he explains in his brief Acknowledgments. It’s possible Nancy related this in some way to one of her friends who told Capote about it later – we know he and his collaborator Harper Lee spent extensive time in Holcomb. But his novelistic approach doesn’t allow him to explain his sourcing or parse out his suppositions from the established facts.

Just one year after In Cold Blood the book became a bestseller, there was a hit movie, much of it shot on location. Here Capote is flanked by the two actors who played Hickock and Smith, respectively, Scott Wilson and Robert Blake. Image from https://medium.com/@Random_Nerds/book-reports-for-adults-in-cold-blood-by-truman-capote-b1275a5244c5.

A lot of bad habits can form when aping this style, which journalists have been proving for decades. But it works here, like when Capote pulls random bits of conversation from the death house when Smith and Hickock are about to hang:

“That Hickock’s got a sense of humor. They was telling me how, about an hour ago, one of the guards says to him, ‘This must be the longest night of your life.’ And Hickock, he laughs and says, ‘No. The shortest.’”

There are touches of Capote the prose artist, describing Smith in court “as lonely and inappropriate as a seagull in a wheat field,” but in the main, the language of In Cold Blood is spare, crisp, matter-of-fact. Where Capote succeeds as artist is where you don’t notice him, structuring the book so as to start right before the crime, fast forward to the bodies being discovered and the investigation, then finally detail the crime in the suspects’ depositions. This creates a hang-fire mood over the first half of the book, and allows sympathies for the killers which wouldn’t have formed had we seen them kill.

What made Capote write In Cold Blood? What stopped him from writing much else, and nothing nearly as important, in the decades that followed? It goes much deeper than the emotional toll of Perry Smith’s execution or the Clutter murders, I think, and Gerald Clarke examines this in his excellent bio Capote. It may just be writing so brilliantly so far outside one’s normal range makes it that much harder to go back to the lighter stuff again.