October Books 16) In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

I don’t read much true crime, though I am as fascinated as anyone by the story of human wickedness. This seemed to me a particularly good (and early) example of the genre, with Capote following events through the stories of the victims, the investigators and the perpetrators, from just before it happened to the day of the executions. The crimes in question took place fifty years ago next month, when the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, were murdered by two men who had recently been paroled from the state prison. Capote devotes a lot of the book to a not unsympathetic psychological portrait of Hickock and Smith, the two killers; though the description of the Kansas environment where the Clutter family lived and died (based partly on notes by Harper Lee, who had just finished writing To Kill A Mockingbird) is also rather memorable. The book was originally published as a series of long articles in The New Yorker, and retains a couple of journalistic touches; the most intrusive of these is that Capote can’t quite decide to keep himself out of the picture he is creating. I see that there have been two recent films about how Capote wrote this book, which is somehow not surprising.

One thought on “October Books 16) In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

  1. Forgive me but you might look at Kickstarter.com as it does exactly what you are doing with PayPal.

Comments are closed.