Truman Capote

Powerful account of the brutal slaying of a Kansas family by two young ex-convicts.

In Cold Blood

An account of the senseless murder of a Kansas farm family and the search for the killers

A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences

Libby audiobook expired before I could finish :(

Jeremy Boyd

Slow but impossible to put down. Made me cry.

Leo Valentine

Itzel

There are people who read books and somehow, they get a deeper message from it than the one the author probably intended. It's weird, but for me, In Cold Blood was the first book I've felt this with.

Telling the story of (as the first pages say) how four gunshots led to the end of six human lives, it's a brilliant crime story, even though it's the novelization of events that truly happened.

The book begins with telling how the last day of the members of the Clutter family happened, and before fifty pages have went, they are dead. The rest of the book is spent in the story of what the murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock did afterwards, an adventure which included traveling to Mexico, and ultimately returning to the States. 

On the other hand, you also had the reactions of everyone on Holcomb who was familiar with the Clutters, and the shock following their death. How a small town, in which everyone was familiar with everyone else, became scared with the brutal deaths of the most loved family from there.

Finally, you also get the story of the detectives assigned to the case, and how Perry and Dick were captured and sentenced to death.

It's a really brilliant book, and you can see why it got so much praise. The investigative work it took for it to be written is impressive, and Truman Capote managed to get so many details from the event.

Although the murders of Clutter weren't the most horrifying ever to be thought (they are in fact, really obvious in the way that they happened, just shots with a hunting rifle), they are rather shocking in the way that they were so coolly made, as neither Perry or Dick felt any kind of remorse after the deaths. The two killers went into the Clutter farm in search of a big sum of money. Not having got it, they left the place with only forty dollars in their bag, and even then, they didn't have any kind of mercy for the terrified family.

And now, for the oh-so-deep thoughts I had when I finished the book. Probably because all that's in there really happened, probably because the characters were most than that, they were real living persons at some point in history, everyone who appeared in the book was so, so beautifully fleshed out, they felt so real and so tangible, without the often flat characters found in fiction.

In short, the book was really great.

Don’t ever buy no Information On Cash In The Safe from the gas station bruh💀💀💀💀

Miles Silverstein

Sarah Sammis

I saw the 1967 Richard Brooks film in a violence in film class at UCLA. In Cold Blood and Texas Chainsaw Massacre are the only two films that have stuck with me for these ten years. So when I was given a copy of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote through BookCrossing, I felt compelled to read it for two reasons: I've enjoyed other books by Capote and I still remember the film. Were it not for those two reasons, I would have skipped the book as I'm not normally a fan of the true-crime genre.

The violent murders of Herbert and Bonnie Clutter and their two youngest children: Nancy and Kenyon in 1959 became a media sensation as these violent crimes are wont to do. Inspired by a 300 word summary of the crime in the New York Times, Capote and long time friend Harper Lee headed west to interview everyone associated with the crime. The result of six year's work was In Cold Blood.

Reading the book clarified in my mind just how well I still remember the film and confirmed that I still am not a fan of true-crime (or the nonfiction novel as Capote called his book). The work is well researched and well written but it wasn't a page-turner for me.

The book suffers from an information overload and a lack of organization. Capote seems lost under all these witness testimonies, not sure what to keep, what to cut and where to put things. Things stumble along in a more or less chronological order but without the benefit of logical segues between interviews.

A masterpiece. The amount of work done by the author is phenomenal. It is not like anything else I’ve read, and it becomes increasingly jarring because you are digesting something as fiction that is true. Definitely a slow burn, but the ending made me sob. 

Eva de Jong

isabellaargote

désirée

National Bestseller On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.

esperanza 

How much is a human life truly worth? This is a book that changed my perspective on everything. Truman Capote does something that many authors can’t do; he makes you root for every character and no character at all. Even at the end, it’s hard to say if the real villains were the people who committed the crime or the society that failed them, condemning them without establishing true justice under the guise of ‘an eye for an eye’. Only 2 days into the new year and I’m already considering it the best read of 2024. 

Kaitlyn R

Derek Barlas

claire law

A bit tough to get into but really picks up after around 40 pages. Super good work of journalism and was fascinating to see all the different people involved in the murder and the case.

In Cold Blood (Penguin Modern Classics)

Wynter

A very detailed account of the gruesome murders of the four members of Clutter family back in 1959. A very gripping and graphic narrative at first unfortunately turned a little dragged out by the time the motive was revealed in the middle of the book. Capote was so meticulous and detailed in his work, that it took a little away from my overall enjoyment of his art. It was hard to read the analysis and the attempts of humanizing these two perpetrators, so maybe that was a bit too much for me. But the writing and structure are so powerful and so emotional, I had to take a few breaks to keep myself calm. What a horrific, senseless crime. Anyone interested in true crime nonfiction must read this staple.

Michael Springer

In Cold Blood was a rare combination: it was a "page turner" that kept me wrapped in the mystery of the crime throughout, and it was also a book with marvellous depth and richness. I recommend this very highly. It's the best book I've read in a long time.

Colleen

I have been fascinated by psychology in general for a long time. Criminal psychology is particularly interesting to me. So reading In Cold Blood seemed like an obvious choice. It is credited with sparking the True Crime genre. It certainly was groundbreaking at the time, although looking back it is easy to see that this book is far from perfect.

Capote referred to it as a "nonfiction novel." What it boils down to is a dramatization of true events. While he clearly did extensive research, it is just as clear that he took liberties with the truth. The dialogue is the main symptom of this. A large portion of the book is dialogue - very long passages of dialogue. While Capote trumpeted his near perfect recall, the extensive dialogue could not be replicated that exactly. Apparently he did not even take notes most of the time or use a recorder. He was that sure of his own memory. But even if his memory was that good (yes, there is skepticism in my tone), there are lengthy exchanges for which he clearly was not present. These are conversations whose contents were relayed to him months or in some cases years after the fact, yet Capote relays the words as if they were absolute truth. It certainly took a lot of supposition on his part. So even before I looked further into the background of this story, I already had doubts as to Capote's professional integrity.

Despite that though, the story is compelling. The senseless tragedy combined with Capote's flowing descriptions drew me in. His writing is poetic yet comprehensive. He obviously used creative license when writing this book, but he also showed the general public that a nonfiction book did not have to be dry and dull. Rather that it could be as absorbing as a novel. This not only sparked interest in True Crime, but also influenced Nonfiction in general. Decades later, its roots are still detectable in books such as Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. 

Although the book is easy to read overall, the narrative did greatly slow in the middle. It becomes bogged down by letters and background info. I wanted to get on to the how and why, but instead had to read at length about people and events that had only the slightest threads connecting them to the crime. Although some of this background information was interesting, such as how the small community reacted to such a violent event, more of it just seemed like filler. The book is padded with the background information of every tertiary character who was in any way connected to the events. Hardly a person was mentioned who did not get at least one paragraph dedicated to their age, profession, marital status, number of children, where they were from, and what they went to school for. At some point this stops being interesting background information and moves to simply being padding. 

In the end the motivation for the crime was not explained to a satisfactory extent. I would have liked more insight into their psychological states, although I understand with the time period why that info was not available. They were limited both by legal restrictions and lack of technology and research.

(view spoiler)[At the end, Capote is clearly the one interviewing the killers although he leaves references to himself as third person allusions to "the reporter." It was as if he wanted to seem omnipresent and all-knowing. It's clear from early on that the killers will be caught and brought in alive, because there was no other logical source for the information at that time. The details Capote kept teasing could only have come directly from the killers. Although since it seems that Capote was the only one with whom they shared that info and the book was published after their execution, it certainly raises questions about just how much came from Capote's mind rather than the truth.

Despite the violence of the crime, the author does seem sympathetic towards the killers in some ways. The story was particularly swayed in favor of Perry. From the greater amount of detail given on his background, it seems evident that he was the main contributor to Capote's information. But I was left with the nagging feeling that the author chose to leave some things out particularly about the motivation. There were also many allusions to the killers being homosexual and having a relationship. These were left mostly as insinuations. Other than calling each other "Baby," most of it was written between the lines. It is likely some of that had to do with the attitudes of the time, but I still have that niggling intuition that the author left some things out intentionally.

The ending was satisfactory but was allegedly fabricated by Capote, so that definitely lessens its impact. (hide spoiler)]

But this book still stands as an influential book. Regardless of the degree of verity, it sparked interest in True Crime, gave some insight into the justice system and the criminal mind, and established that nonfiction could be engaging and page turning.

Ease of Reading: 4 Stars
Writing Style: 3 Stars	
Originality: 4 Stars
Accuracy: 3 Stars
Plot Structure and Development: 3 Stars
Attention to detail: 4 Stars (even if some of those details were fudged)

Matthew Royal

As with many seminal works that pioneered a genre, this book is... fine. Capote was one of the first to write a non-fiction novelization of "true crime" events, and the genre is now well-established and unremarkable, but this book was the original "Serial."

Capote extensively interviewed people who knew the family and the murderers, and much of the story does have an unsensational ring of truth. The murderers aren't the classic waxed-mustache villains with a dastardly smile; they're not insane perverts in the modern trope: they're amoral, asocial men of the type which humanity has always had among us, and is labeling now as "incels," who have a palpable feeling of their own superiority and believe society owes them.

One of the most striking parts of this book to me were the statistics on incarceration by race. "The present warden, Sherman H. Crouse, keeps a chart which lists the daily total according to race (for example, White 1405, Colored 360, mexicans 12, Indians 6)." page 559. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons' website as of Sat, 15 Feb 2020, of the 173k federal inmates in their custody, 37.5% are Black. If we were to take both figures as representative of both time periods, then over 60 years Black inmates have increased by 86%!

Capote comments on the time it takes for someone to go through the justice system, from conviction to paying the ultimate price, criticizing how easy it is to prolong the appeals process. It's an easy target, but Capote doesn't explicitly condemn capital punishment or suggest a better process. Something to chew on, as the justice system has only gotten worse given time and inattention.

Prashanth Srivatsa

In eloquent prose and compelling detail, Capote reconstructs the true-story murder of an innocent family of four at the hands of two ex-convicts, and dives headfirst into a psychological examination of the act's motivations, consequence and the red stain it leaves on the minds of those who were aware of it. It is not only a horrifying journey into the minds of the killers, but also serves as a reminder as to why capital punishment will always be dragged back into lands and hearts that have deemed it inhuman. Chilling, gory and written with journalistic flair, In Cold Blood is an absolute masterpiece.

Great and innovative use of the chronicle, with an assortment of genres mixed in the story. It has its fair share of storytelling, scientific facts and police reports. It does a wonderful job of creating the psychological profile of the murderers.
I understand the time it was written in; however, the use of slurs from the author himself that weren't part of real conversations and some ideological implications made me uneasy.

Emmett

An intriguing mix of cold journalism and the pure poetry of American farmlands and small towns in a true story(?) of the grisly quadruple murders of the Clutter household (Mr & Mrs Clutter, and their two children) in a small agricultural town which is famous for little else. Capote gives the facts, like all true crime books, he fills in the context, recounts the murderers' movements before, during and after the deed. He depicts the investigative doggedness of the officers assigned to the case, traces the crime scene - picked to the bone, the dismal lack of any real evidence - the slow-crawl of the case, then the chance encounter with a shred of evidence that points strongly in a single direction. (exposing again the fallacy of the wrongdoer's confidence in how easily having pulled off the perfect crime - the clue comes from somewhere they least expect). Capote reports the trial, the arguments, and final conviction and death, even segueing a little to psychology to explain the mental condition of the two convicts. However this is true crime quite unlike the modern version, it's almost a novel, with Capote's prose giving every detail a melancholy, deeply poetic cast ("Spring. Though mud abounded underfoot, the sun, so long shrouded by snow and cloud, seemed an object freshly made, and the trees - Mr Clutter's orchard of pear and apple trees, the elms shading the lane - were lightly veiled in a haze of virginal green."), the writer entering and inhabiting for a moment the mind and spirit of every person, investigator, criminal, town resident and thereby giving present life and colour, and with that, a certain inscrutable dignity to that person. Crucially, everyone explored has a name, a specific situation, a specific thought - Capote allows no one to remain generic, hazy (and perhaps by implication, a product of lazy writing/journalism). His highly malleable pen enters thought through third person (with a rare and haunting psychological precision in lines such as "Willie-Jay ... had seen him ... as he saw himself - 'exceptional,' 'rare,' 'artistic.' In Willie-Jay his vanity had found support, his sensibility shelter, and the four-month exile from this high-carat appreciation had made it more alluring than any dream of buried gold."), quotations of interviews, fine letters ("There is no shame having a dirty face, the shame comes when you keep it dirty."). In doing so, persons involved are persistently whole - no one more so than the killers, which Capote, in adopting the variety of reporting devices, subtly refuses to reduce. Even as he anatomises their behaviour, views it from the multiple lenses of social disenfranchisement, personal fault, mental illness, social pariah, self-perception and deception to revisit and provide another answer to the question of 'What made them do this?', even the evil and atrocity of the act is not questioned, they are so complicated and contradictory and multi-faceted that they cannot be contained into just a word/phrase.

Notably the psychological aspect (reproduced below from apparently an article in a journal) strikes this reader as so fascinatingly modern in understanding: on 'Murder without Apparent Motive" - 'these individuals are predisposed to severe lapses in ego-control which makes possibe the open expression of primitive violence, born out of previous, and now unconscious, traumatic experiences. ... The men themselves ... were puzzled as to why they killed their victims, who were relatively unknown to them, and in each instance the murderer appears to have lapsed into a dreamlike dissociative trance from which he awakened to 'suddenly discover' himself assaulting the victim. ... The mot uniform and perhaps the most significant finding was a long-standing, sometimes lifelong, history of erratic control over aggressive impulses. ... Despite the violence in their lives, all of the men had ego-images of themselves as physically inferior, weak and inadequate. The histories revealed in each a  severe degree of sexual inhibition. To all of them, adult women were threatening creatures ... All of them, too, had been concerned throughout their early years about being considered 'sissies', physically undersized or sickly.. ... Also seen in the historical background of all cases was the occurrence of extreme parental violence during childhood. [One] of them men had many violent beatings in order to 'break' him of his stammering and fits, as well as to correct him for allegedly bad behaviour. Their relationships with others were of a shallow, cold nature, lending a quality of loneliness and isolation to these men. People were scarcely real to them, in the sense of being warmly or positively (or even angrily) felt about. ... The murderous potential can become activated, especially if some disequilibrium is already present, when the victim-to-be is unconsciously perceived as a key figure in some past traumatic configuration. The behavior, or even the mere presence, of this figure adds a stress to the unstable balance of forces that results in a sudden extreme discharge of violence, similar to the explosion that takes place when a percussion cap ignites a charge of dynamite." Sounds familiar?

not that interesting tbh. i see how it caused a lot of impact at the time, but i dont think it ages rlly well. also, i feel like i've heard/read/seen this story a thousand times. yea, sure, maybe capote was the first to write it, but unfortunately for him its not the first to be read by me. 

Antonia Folch

Toyah Blackburn

"What it comes down to is I want the diamonds more than I'm afraid of the snake"

 Truman Capote's nonfiction account of the real life murders of four members of the Clutter family in 1959 in Holcomb, Kansas is told in detail from several perspectives. 

As the story of the events surrounding the murders progresses, the reader sees different aspects of the killers emerging, and their relationship with each other changes. 

When the story opens, Dick Hicock is painted as more of the ringleader, with Perry Smith being the weaker of the two, the sheep who got drawn in. As the story develops, these perceptions are brought into question and their relationship begins to unravel. 

There are several points where both Hicock and Smith reveal what they secretly really think of each other. Could they really just be playing each other? 

The murders are never explicitly discussed by the killers. They are both described as having violent tendencies, with the ability to appear "normal" (something they repeatedly mention). They appear very disconnected from the crime; when discussing a similar crime committed I'm Tallahassee, Perry comments that he wouldn't be surprised if it was "done by a lunatic". This disconnect from their true nature features throughout. However when Dick is attracted to a young girl, he is seen to feel remorseful about it. Perry picks up on Dick's intentions, and despises him for it. The pair do have moral compasses, but they do not extend to those people that they perceive to be better off in life than they are. There are huge polar opposite existent in their personalities. 

When we meet the police officer leading the investigation, Dewey, we meet his family and get to know him. We also see the clashing aspects of his humanity. As much as he fights for justice, he also shows compassion when he feels bad for Perry because his childhood was unhappy. Yet he also believes that justice should be served on the adults they have become. This duality of perspectives is seen throughout the story. 

Through the varied perspectives from which the story is told, it offers a fascinating sociological study into the truth of human nature. Disturbing precisely because it is based in fact.

Todd Luallen

I picked this book up because I wanted to read a book by Capote, and because this is the book to read if you are going to do such a thing. I was not disappointed. What an astonishing journey. I'm not a true crime drama fan, nor would I want to be, but I do enjoy reading books outside my normal tastes on occasion. I do recommend this book, but I would caution that it is disturbing to get a glimpse inside the minds of killers. And I would also caution that it can spark a morbid curiosity that, in my opinion, is best fed sparingly.

Kathy Andrew

Ley Stanton

Full review on my blog: https://leyreads.wordpress.com/2016/0...

Though you know the outcome from the beginning, there is this tension that rises from the first page. Almost as if the family will survive in this rendition. The killers will change their minds or the family will survive through miraculous means. However, neither of these things happens. For the first fifty pages or so, I was on edge waiting for the murders to occur. Then, just like that, they were over and we had skipped to the aftermath. It was such a masterful way to keep the reader on the hook.

The dual perspectives of this story also made for another fascinating element. From the beginning of the book, you know the identity of the killers and their movements as they parallel the family’s. Seeing the murders from their side as well gave it more clarity. This was not a senseless killing that happened to the Clutter family. Even before they were both out of prison, on previous charges; they had plans to murder this family and how they were going to do it. This doesn’t feel like a spoiler because the bare facts of the case are in the synopsis for the book. It’s also a fairly well-known case from the 50s-60s.

My biggest issue with In Cold Blood was the last 30 or so pages, where Capote gets into the sentences of the other inmates on death row with the Clutter family killers. While it was interesting to hear their unique situations, it made no sense to include this information in the book. It honestly felt like Capote was getting paid by the page and decided to throw these in to fluff out the end of the book. This is the place where the book lost a full star for me, I just found it a bad way to wrap up a book.

Fraser Simons

I couldn’t get into the cadence of the authorial voice and the story may have been shocking and more interesting for the time period. As someone who reads and watches a lot of crime specific to these kinds of things, it’s kind of forgettable. It was okay, but not something I found to read very quickly nor a thing I wanted to return to each night. Just fine, for me. Nothing special.

In Cold Blood

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