In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
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Book Reviews of In Cold Blood
Book Review: Brilliant, unblinking, ambivalent---a classic of journalism
Summary: 5 Stars
In my News Reporting and Writing class, my professor recently brought up the topic of using tape recorders in an interview. While they may be good for "covering your ass" if you forget a certain point your interview subject made, one must also keep in mind that not everyone is comfortable about being recorded---and making your interview subject comfortable is one of the foremost principles in good interviewing.
Truman Capote apparently thought that way too about tape recording. According to my professor, one thing Capote was always proud of about his famous book IN COLD BLOOD was that not once did he feel the need to take out either a tape recorder or even a notebook. In one interview, Capote, admitting to a terrific memory, said, "I can repeat almost verbatim any conversation up to as long as eight hours. I could never have written IN COLD BLOOD if I had ever produced a pencil, much less a tape recorder."
Knowing about Capote's research methods will only enhance your appreciation for IN COLD BLOOD, a brilliant "nonfiction novel" in which Capote seems to get into the heads of all of the major characters. It's uncanny, reading what is essentially a piece of journalistic reporting that reads just as vividly as a well-written novel. Not only can Capote conjure up a sense of place, as he does with the small town of Holcomb, Kansas (in which the senseless, horrible slaughter of four members of the Clutter family occur); he brings to remarkable life real-life characters such as Dick Hickock and Perry Smith simply from one-on-one interviews (and some research). Throughout the course of this book, you really get to know these people, for well and ill. By the end, as Hickock and Smith are finally hanged for their crimes, you may even feel a little bit of sympathy for them.
But only a little bit. Capote is remarkably even-handed throughout IN COLD BLOOD; like a good reporter, he leaves subjectivity at the door and simply tells a compelling, complex story. Hickock and Smith are not made out to be martyrs of any kind, and Capote doesn't manipulate his prose in order to make it seem like they are. He recounts some of the unfortunate backstories of both these men, but Capote only sets these facts down for the record, not as a way to excuse their crimes. Instead, he tells the story and allows the reader to make his/her own judgments.
Capote's objectivity extends into the thorny issue of the effectiveness of the death penalty. Capote makes no blanket statements about that either, but, throughout the book's final section ("The Corner"), it is an issue that is clearly on his mind. You hear nuggets from people who stand on both sides of the issue, at least in regards to Hickock and Smith. Again, the author does not state, or even imply, a preference for one side or the other. What Capote does---and what, I think, makes IN COLD BLOOD a valuable work in furthering a discussion of the issue---is higlighting the human factor that always makes the death penalty such a difficult issue. Dick Hickock and Perry Smith may have deserved their deaths, because their crime was well-nigh inhumane; but Capote, through his journalistic and stylistic brilliance, always reminds us of their underlying humanity. Their crime may have been monstrous, but Capote never paints them as monsters; they have feelings, and they have hopes and dreams like most of us. Whether that makes their deaths any less excusable is a point that Capote, perhaps unsure himself of where he stands, allows the reader to think about after the book has been finished.
And IN COLD BLOOD is so remarkable, so compelling, and so extraordinarily written that it will be hard for anyone to put it down until it has been finished. Even after you've finished though, you might be hardpressed to forget it. Highly recommended.
Book Review: Crime, punishment, and more
Summary: 5 Stars
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote was published in 1966, and is based on events that happened almost fifty years ago. The events were real. This is not a work of fiction. The Clutters, an appropriately surnamed Kansas family, have their own complications within their rambling homestead. What family doesn't? Clutter the father is a farmer. Who isn't in these parts? Life is not so productive of late. Whose is? The two younger children, a daughter and a son, still live in. The others have left, happily.
And then, in November 1959, the four Clutters are found gagged, apart from the mother, all with their throats cut and their brains blown out by shotgun fire. The community is in turmoil. No-one can explain why anyone might have wanted to kill a whole family in Holcomb, a small, poor, rural community in the mid-West Bible belt.
Hickock (Hicock) and Smith are two lads on the move. Their families might be dysfunctional. On the other hand they might not. Their socialisation might have been lacking. On the other hand it might not. For whatever reason, individually and collectively they prey on others, prey in a way that renders them culpable, detectable and ultimately punishable. They know thieving is wrong. So, one of them says, we've stolen lives, so it must be serious. It was the two of them that pulled the trigger, that blew brains out, that slit throats, that did not quite commit rape. There are limits. And all for forty dollars and a transistor radio.
I give nothing of this book away when I reveal that the two lads did commit the murders - exactly how no-one ever admitted - and that, after years of litigious wrangling, both were hanged. The strength of In Cold Blood is not what happens, but how it happens.
Truman Capote offers us a vast book in just four sustained chapters, each of which is sub-divided as the narrative shifts between aspects of the different protagonists' lives. Throughout, the style is much more complex than mere journalism, but the clarity with which it communicates is at times breathtaking. We hear from those directly involved, both victims and perpetrators, their families, the police, the judiciary, the neighbours, the lawyers, the passers-by, the acquaintances, the cellmates. The detail is forensic.
It is essential that the reader is constantly reminded that this is not fiction. Truman Capote offers dialogue where a journalist would report, offers interpretation where an historian would defer, offer opinion where an observer might decline. And so In Cold Blood becomes and absorbing, multi-faceted, mid-twentieth century reworking of Crime And Punishment. The crucial difference that the intervening years have generated is that where the latter concentrated on the individual circumstances and motives of the perpetrator, In Cold Blood explores the social and the contextual alongside the psychological.
And this is where the book becomes deeply disturbing, because it seems to suggest that the individuality that contemporary society seems to demand of us might itself promote a degree of self-centredness, of selfishness, perhaps, that might give rise to nothing less than contempt for others. In the forty years since the publication of In Cold Blood, it could be argued that such pressures might have increased. Frightening, indeed.
Book Review: A Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
Truman Capote, with major help from Nell Harper Lee, produced groundbreaking work with 1965's In Cold Blood. These days there are probably few readers or film fans not already acquainted with the basic details of the crime upon which Capote based the book: Herb Clutter, his wife and two youngest children, both teenagers, were shot to death in November 1959 in their isolated Holcomb, Kansas, farmhouse. Two petty criminals who had recently been paroled by the Kansas prison system were arrested, convicted of the murders and, almost six years after the killings, finally faced the hangman.
By today's standards, sadly enough, this crime does not seem to have been an extremely brutal or sensational one. But 1959 America was not yet numb to this kind of thing and the crime was reported in detail across the country, even grabbing the attention of novelist and short story writer, Truman Capote in New York City. Capote recognized the potential to turn this crime into a book and, with childhood friend Harper Lee in tow, went to Kansas to do his research. But this time, instead of a novel, Capote may have invented something new: a true crime account that reads more like a novel than it does as nonfiction.
In Cold Blood does a masterful job of describing the murders but, as in any good novel, Capote allows the suspense to build for a long time before he reveals the details of those four horrible deaths. In the meantime he has turned the four victims into real people by providing the details of their everyday lives, their hopes and dreams and what each of them meant to the community in which they lived. When Capote's story finally reaches the final minutes of their lives, the reader is left with a sense of the huge waste that happened at the hands of the two rather shallow sociopaths who destroyed them.
Capote performs the same feat with the two killers, turning them into real people, hard as it is to feel any sympathy for either of them. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock were losers in every sense of the word, two callous sociopaths who felt absolutely no sympathy for anyone they criminally victimized, even the four people they murdered. Although it is never mentioned by Capote in his book, he developed a strong relationship with the two from almost the moment they were returned to Kansas to face their accusers. He was especially taken with Perry Smith, the American Indian runt of the pair, and took advantage of that relationship to gain access to many of Smith's personal photos, journals, letters and drawings. He quotes entire letters and passages from the writings of both Smith and Hickock throughout the book, in fact, but only described the photos and drawings that he obtained from Smith.
Capote's In Cold Blood style has been much copied but has seldom been matched. His melding of a fiction style with a true crime account is so complete that it is very easy to forget the book is not, in fact, a novel. This is the book for which Truman Capote will be forever remembered and, considering that nothing quite like it had ever really been accomplished before, it is truly a masterpiece.
Book Review: Yes, it's good
Summary: 5 Stars
People will pick this book up for a lot of reasons: the famous title (and movie); the treatment in the recent movie about Truman Capote; curiosity about this classic work; fascination with 'true crime,' and other reasons. I read it for the first reason, but with a little skepticism for the fawning over Capote and his own historic fascination with the killers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. What I found was, simply, a very well written book. That the subject matter is a brutal and outragous mass murder is almost an unsavory distraction from the fact that the story is so well told. To my surprise, Capote was never unduly sympathetic to the killers in his writings (as I had been led to believe that he had been). For that matter, the family of victims were themselves portrayed without sentiment. Capote simply built the story very well and painted a complete picture that makes the reader (even nearly 50 years after the incidents occurred) feel the he/she knows all of the players intimately. The crime itself (like other lesser crimes committed by these morons) was disgusting, but, from a literary perspective, I was pleased to be made to literally squirm as Capote lays the story out (again, this is 50 years later). Capote was writing in a more censored society - thus we are mercifully spared many of the gory details. Yet I wonder whether any writer could have communicated the brutality any 'better' - just as old movies use clever techniques to communicate the sex scene (the ol' train going into the tunnel), Capote makes the crime quite clear without having to paint the scene. Masterful.
Two more quick comments. One of the delights of this book is seeing the world of America in 1959. As the reader follows the two aforementioned morons around the USA (and Mexico) on their post-massacre weeks long search for money, work, and happiness, we are treated to a travelogue filled with diners, stolen '56 Chevys, hitchhikers, and Route 66. We also see the challenges of police work before DNA tests, computerized tools, and high-speed communications - and we're amazed that they identified their killers and found them 2,000 miles away. Also, Capote's sense of timing was marvelous. For example, the reader is taken deep into the book (and long past the occurrence of the murders) before Capote reveals the play-by-play of what went on in that house - and when the story is told, it comes from the lips of the shooter himself. Chilling.
I knew about Capote and read a little of his other stuff, but didn't appreciate his gift until I read his masterpiece on the bizarre subject of crime and punishment: In Cold Blood. A must for your canon.
Book Review: Capote at his best
Summary: 5 Stars
To call "In Cold Blood" a "true-crime" story is to diminish Truman Capote's enormous talent as a writer. Capote wanted to create a new form of writing which he termed the "non-fiction novel": a work of historical or contemporary fact writting in the form of a novel. To an extent, he succeeded. Rather than a dry recitation of the story of a multiple murder, "In Cold Blood" sweeps us up in the narrative much as a good work of fiction does. Except the events in this book are all too real.Capote tells us the story of the Clutter family murders in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas in 1959 from all angles: the Clutters themselves, the lowlife killers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, and the detectives of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation who brought them to justice. We meet the Clutters first: Herb Clutter, a pillar of the community and his sensitive wife Bonnie, suffering from bouts of depression; and their two children, the popular, outgoing Nancy and the introverted Kenyon. Then there are Smith and Hickock, two small-town, small-time criminals who hit the big time in one horrendous night when they murder the entire Clutter family. And there is the KBI team that followed each slender lead to bring them to justice.
Capote's narrative of the trial which lead to the conviction and execution of Hickock and Smith is as fascinating as his telling of the events which lead to their capture. We can attempt to understand what drove Smith to kill, growing up in a chaotic family; Hickock is more of an enigma. Capote presents the senior Hickocks as two caring and conscientious parents whose son rejected the principles they tried to instill in him. Can good parents raise a bad kid? Certainly the Hickocks did. Smith at least had a conscience, something Hickock never bothered about. Did they deserve to die for their crime? Capote seems to have been leaning against the death penalty in general. He emphasizes that the judge chose the strictest possible interpretation of the mental incapacity statues which might have applied to Perry Smith. The conclusion of the trial was almost foregone; the detectives had carefully built an airtight case. Hickock and Smith end up on the gallows.
The book's ending is a wistful scene between the leading KBI investigator and Nancy's best friend, Susan, now a young woman entering college; just such a young woman, Capote says, that Nancy might have been had she lived to grow up. In that final scene, we see, as Capote meant us to see, the waste of six lives -- the Clutters, and the killers' own.