In Cold Blood

The Clutters and Holcomb, Kansas

Truman Capote opens In Cold Blood not with the murders but with the world that existed before them. Holcomb is a small farming community on the high wheat plains of western Kansas — flat, spare, isolated, a place where everyone knows everyone and the primary business of life is the growing of things. At its center, in the pages Capote devotes to them before anything bad happens, are the Clutters: Herbert, a prosperous wheat farmer known for his integrity and his refusal to carry debt; his wife Bonnie, gentle and withdrawn, who had struggled for years with a depression that confined her increasingly to her room; their daughter Nancy, sixteen, the most popular girl in her high school class, busy with 4-H and piano lessons and a boyfriend her father quietly disapproved of; and their son Kenyon, fifteen, quiet and mechanical, happy in his workshop. These are not complicated people in the way literary characters are complicated. They are simply specific: real people in a real community, living a life that had particular textures and habits and rhythms.

This establishment is the book’s structural foundation. Capote understood that without it, the crime is merely lurid — two men killed four people in Kansas. With it, the crime is an annihilation of something irreplaceable. The Clutter household had a particular smell, a particular quality of Sunday-morning light, a particular order that Herbert’s character had imposed on it. Capote tells the story of the crime and its investigation simultaneously with the story of Smith and Hickock driving toward Kansas, so the reader holds both in mind at once: the family going about their ordinary Friday, the killers approaching on the highway. The structural irony is unbearable, and Capote sustains it with complete control.

Perry Smith and Dick Hickock

The plan, such as it was, came from Floyd Wells, a former Clutter farmhand who had shared a cell with Dick Hickock in Kansas State Penitentiary. Wells told Hickock about the Clutter farm, embellishing as he went — he mentioned, incorrectly, a safe in Herbert Clutter’s office containing ten thousand dollars in cash. Hickock recruited Perry Smith, and together they drove to Holcomb on November 14, 1959, arriving in the early hours of November 15. There was no safe. There was approximately fifty dollars in cash. What happened next cost four people their lives.

Capote’s portrait of the two men is the book’s most lasting achievement. Dick Hickock is the planner: superficially charming, relatively untroubled by conscience, more legibly criminal in the ordinary sense. Perry Smith is the more difficult figure — and the one Capote clearly found more compelling. Smith had an abused childhood that reads, in Capote’s rendering, like a case study in the making of violence: an alcoholic father, a mother who died of drink, a series of institutions that failed him in every direction. He had artistic ability and a tenderness that coexists, mysteriously, with what he did in the Clutter house. Capote shared with Smith a background of abandonment and poverty, and the identification is visible in the prose. This creates the book’s central ethical problem: Capote’s Smith is so fully realised, so sympathetically rendered, that readers have long felt the Clutter family — the actual victims — receive less attention than their killers. The night in the house itself is rendered with specificity but without exploitation; Capote tells what happened without dwelling in it, which is a form of respect for the dead.

The New Journalism and Its Legacy

Capote called what he had written a “nonfiction novel” — a form that used all the techniques of fiction (rendered scenes, dialogue, interior consciousness, narrative structure built for suspense and revelation) while remaining, in his account, entirely true. He spent six years in Kansas, conducted hundreds of interviews, built a close friendship with KBI detective Alvin Dewey and his wife Marie, and attended the trial of Smith and Hickock in January 1960. When they were sentenced to death and the appeals process began, he continued to visit them on death row, writing the book around them. Smith and Hickock were hanged on April 14, 1965. Capote was present at the execution. He later said it destroyed something in him.

He published almost nothing of substance for the rest of his life. The book that invented a genre, that demonstrated long-form journalism could achieve everything fiction could, cost its author something he was never able to recover. The ethical questions the book raised — about invented dialogue, composite scenes, and the moral weight of a writer’s emotional attachment to his subjects — were not answered and are still being asked. Its influence is everywhere: in Tom Wolfe, in Gay Talese, in Erik Larson’s meticulous historical crime narratives, in the entire apparatus of prestige true crime podcasting and television. In Cold Blood created the template for writing about terrible events as if they were literature, and the genre has never stopped wrestling with what that template costs.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — The book that made literary nonfiction a genre, and has never been surpassed within it.