In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
I listened to an audiobook of this novel and think it made the experience even more chilling and thrilling. Hearing the conversation below between the two killers, rather than just reading it made me shudder on my drive to work.
“Know what I think?” said Perry. “I think there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did.”
…
”Deal me out, baby.” Dick said. “I’m a normal.”
Truman Capote believed that journalism and creative writing should come together in the form of what he called the “nonfiction novel”. After reading an article in The New York Times about a gruesome quadruple murder on a Kansas farm, he found the perfect subject of his next project. Although it started as a series of articles for The New Yorker, In Cold Blood was soon made into a novel. A novel that would blend nonfiction and fiction and become a wonderful classic within the crime genre.
We start with a detailed description of the wholesome Holcomb, Kansas and its’ main businesses and prominent townspeople. Holcomb was a small town that had a tight-nit community and seemed the perfect place to raise a family. Until what seems like a senseless crime, the murder of four beloved people, shakes the community to its core. Suddenly, Holcomb doesn’t seem so safe and its’ inhabitants rush to purchase new locks for their homes, distrust each other and are suscipious of every bump in the night. This shock even pushes some to leave the town and state altogether.
Capote does an amazing job of piecing together this crime. Although he begins the book by introducing you to both the victims and most obviously the killers, you are still in suspense throughout the entire novel.
Told through interviews of the family, friends, acquaintances and community, the Clutter family receives significant character development. Even though we will never hear their accounts, you feel as if you are with them in their last couple days.
Not only are the victims explained so well, but Capote also gives you the full backstory of both killers, Dick and Perry. Through their personal confessions and comments to the police, accounts from their family members and acquaintances, as well as the interview Capote has with them himself, Dick and Perry are almost humanized. I would not say I empathize with these two killers based on their difficult lives; they did decide to rob a family and murder any potential witness and actually followed through on it even though they both had doubts. However, you could see how their lives and struggles partially shaped them into these cold and unstable men.
Capote makes a comment about the fact that although this family’s murder gained a lot of press and sparked fear in so many, it was only one of many similar murders the same year. This shows that even in the 1950s, America was starting to become desensitized to the brutal violence plaguing our country. Americans back then, just as many Americans now, will see a small paragraph in a newspaper or hear a brief mention on the news about a brutal killing and it won’t be a surprise. This is a sad state of affairs for our country and the world that this violence may never stop.
Synopsis: 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.