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In Cold Blood (Paperback)
by Truman Capote
| Category:
Criminal, the nonfiction novel |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
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¥ 148.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
What an incredible book, touching, horrifying and saddening, based on a true story about an entire family murdered. Capote dives into the minds of the killers; A gift of humanization in the guise of beautiful prose. |
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Author: Truman Capote
Publisher: Vintage
Pub. in: February, 1994
ISBN: 0679745580
Pages: 368
Measurements: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00782
Other information: Reprint edition
ISBN-13: 978-0679745587
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- MSL Picks -
On November 15, 1959, in Holcomb, Kansas, the four members of the Clutter family were dragged from their beds in the early hours of the morning and tied up. All four were shot in the head with a shotgun at close range. None survived. The killers left few clues, and there was no apparent motive for the slayings.
On assignment from the New Yorker, author Truman Capote, along with his assistant Nell Harper Lee, traveled to Holcomb in late 1959 to investigate the killings for an article. The article was completed, but still Capote remained in Holcomb. He conducted interviews with every person in town; he poured over police records and statements. Once the killers, drifters Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, were caught and sentenced, he even interviewed them on Death Row. The Clutter killings became an obsession for him; and that obsession turned into a book that would become a literary milestone, that would singlehandedly introduce a new genre to the literary world: the nonfiction novel. He called his piece of creative nonfiction In Cold Blood, and it so consumed him that it would be the last thing he'd ever write.
In most true crime books that are written today the evidence is presented straightforwardly unemotionally. Such is not the case with this book. Capote's prose is mesmerizing. His descriptions of Holcomb and its inhabitants are vivid and lively. His research is impeccable, presented flawlessly, lushly, sweeping the reader away on waves of vibrant language.
And his imagery is heartbreaking: Nancy Clutter teaching a neighbor to make a cherry pie, Dick Hickock deliberately hitting a dog on the highway, the Clutters' old mare standing alone in an overgrown pasture. With startling empathy, Capote transports his readers to the Holcomb, Kansas, of late 1959: We feel the tension and sorrow clouding the town; we watch as the police nearly crumble under the weight of their investigation; we're with Dick and Perry as they flee across the United States to Mexico, leaving a trail of bounced checks in their wake, and we're with them in their cells on Death Row. We're right there the whole time, from the day before the Clutters are killed to the day after their murderers are executed. And Capote is unflinching; he keeps us there, even when the honesty of his prose makes us uncomfortable, even when we can't imagine reading on but somehow can't seem to stop.
It is a violent, unflinching account, sorrowful beyond belief; but, in the hands of a master like Capote, it's really hard to stop reading about this unfortunate family and their motiveless, pathetic murderers.
- From quoting Cassandra Warren
Target readers:
General readers
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Truman Capote was a native of New Orleans, where he was born on September 30, 1924. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was an international literary success when first published in 1948, and accorded the author a prominent place among the writers of America's postwar generation. He sustained this position subsequently with short-story collections (A Tree of Night, among others), novels and novellas (The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany's), some of the best travel writing of our time (Local Color), profiles and reportage that appeared originally in The New Yorker (The Duke in His Domain and The Muses Are Heard), a true-crime masterpiece (In Cold Blood), several short memiors about his childhood in the South (A Christmas Memory, The Thanksgiving Visitor, and One Christmas), two plays (The Grass Harp and House of Flowers and two films (Beat the devil and The Innocents).
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From the publisher
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.
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The Last to See Them Alive
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.
Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to see--simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign - DANCE -but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold on a dirty window - HOLCOMB BANK. The bank closed in 1933, and its former counting rooms have been converted into apartments. It is one of the town's two "apartment houses," the second being a ramshackle mansion known, because a good part of the local school's faculty lives there, as the Teacherage. But the majority of Holcomb's homes are one-story frame affairs, with front porches.
Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide jacket and denims and cowboy boots, presides over a falling-apart post office. The depot itself, with its peeling sulphur-colored paint, is equally melancholy; the Chief, the Super-Chief, the El Capitan go by every day, but these celebrated expresses never pause there. No passenger trains do--only an occasional freight. Up on the highway, there are two filling stations, one of which doubles as a meagerly supplied grocery store, while the other does extra duty as a café--Hartman's Café, where Mrs. Hartman, the proprietress, dispenses sandwiches, coffee, soft drinks, and 3.2 beer. (Holcomb, like all the rest of Kansas, is "dry.")
And that, really, is all. Unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb School, a good-looking establishment, which reveals a circumstance that the appearance of the community otherwise camouflages: that the parents who send their children to this modern and ably staffed "consolidated" school--the grades go from kindergarten through senior high, and a fleet of buses transport the students, of which there are usually around three hundred and sixty, from as far as sixteen miles away--are, in general, a prosperous people. Farm ranchers, most of them, they are outdoor folk of very varied stock--German, Irish, Norwegian, Mexican, Japanese. They raise cattle and sheep, grow wheat, milo, grass seed, and sugar beets. Farming is always a chancy business, but in western Kansas its practitioners consider themselves "born gamblers," for they must contend with an extremely shallow precipitation (the annual average is eighteen inches) and anguishing irrigation problems. However, the last seven years have been years of droughtless beneficence. The farm ranchers in Finney County, of which Holcomb is a part, have done well; money has been made not from farming alone but also from the exploitation of plentiful natural-gas resources, and its acquisition is reflected in the new school, the comfortable interiors of the farmhouses, the steep and swollen grain elevators.
Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans - in fact, few Kansans-had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there. The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life - to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club. But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises - on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles. At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them - four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again -those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.
The master of River Valley Farm, Herbert William Clutter, was forty-eight years old, and as a result of a recent medical examination for an insurance policy, knew himself to be in first-rate condition. Though he wore rimless glasses and was of but average height, standing just under five feet ten, Mr. Clutter cut a man's-man figure. His shoulders were broad, his hair had held its dark color, his square-jawed, confident face retained a healthy-hued youthfulness, and his teeth, unstained and strong enough to shatter walnuts, were still intact. He weighed a hundred and fifty-four - the same as he had the day he graduated from Kansas State University, where he had majored in agriculture. He was not as rich as the richest man in Holcomb - Mr. Taylor Jones, a neighboring rancher. He was, however, the community's most widely known citizen, prominent both there and in Garden City, the close-by county seat, where he had headed the building committee for the newly completed First Methodist Church, an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar edifice. He was currently chairman of the Kansas Conference of Farm Organizations, and his name was everywhere respectfully recognized among Midwestern agriculturists, as it was in certain Washington offices, where he had been a member of the Federal Farm Credit Board during the Eisenhower administration.
Always certain of what he wanted from the world, Mr. Clutter had in large measure obtained it. On his left hand, on what remained of a finger once mangled by a piece of farm machinery, he wore a plain gold band, which was the symbol, a quarter-century old, of his marriage to the person he had wished to marry--the sister of a college classmate, a timid, pious, delicate girl named Bonnie Fox, who was three years younger than he. She had given him four children - a trio of daughters, then a son. The eldest daughter, Eveanna, married and the mother of a boy ten months old, lived in northern Illinois but visited Holcomb frequently. Indeed, she and her family were expected within the fortnight, for her parents planned a sizable Thanksgiving reunion of the Clutter clan (which had its beginnings in Germany; the first immigrant Clutter - or Klotter, as the name was then spelled - arrived here in 1880); fifty-odd kinfolk had been asked, several of whom would be traveling from places as far away as Palatka, Florida. Nor did Beverly, the child next in age to Eveanna, any longer reside at River Valley Farm; she was in Kansas City, Kansas, studying to be a nurse. Beverly was engaged to a young biology student, of whom her father very much approved; invitations to the wedding, scheduled for Christmas Week, were already printed. Which left, still living at home, the boy, Kenyon, who at fifteen was taller than Mr. Clutter, and one sister, a year older - the town darling, Nancy.
In regard to his family, Mr. Clutter had just one serious cause for disquiet--his wife's health. She was "nervous," she suffered "little spells" - such were the sheltering expressions used by those close to her. Not that the truth concerning "poor Bonnie's afflictions" was in the least a secret; everyone knew she had been an on-and-off psychiatric patient the last half-dozen years. Yet even upon this shadowed terrain sunlight had very lately sparkled. The past Wednesday, returning from two weeks of treatment at the Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, her customary place of retirement, Mrs. Clutter had brought scarcely credible tidings to tell her husband; with joy she informed him that the source of her misery, so medical opinion had at last decreed, was not in her head but in her spine - it was physical, a matter of misplaced vertebrae. Of course, she must undergo an operation, and afterward - well, she would be her "old self" again. Was it possible - the tension, the withdrawals, the pillow-muted sobbing behind locked doors, all due to an out-of-order backbone? If so, then Mr. Clutter could, when addressing his Thanksgiving table, recite a blessing of unmarred gratitude.
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| View all 10 comments |
Jesse Van Sant (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-28 00:00>
Great writing, disturbing story... very well done. The portrait of Perry Smith was extremely convincing, which made the whole thing all the more chilling: made me wish we could take better care of those who are on the fringes of society...also made me want to lock my doors at night. With that said I should note that I didn't necessarily experience In Cold Blood as a page turner, although it was definitely engrossing in its own way. It seems that "True crime" books of this nature are not so unique anymore, but this one is extremely well written and finely structured, and the characters really come alive... their backgrounds, their thoughts about what happened, the factors that contributed to the tragedy. To me the most shocking thing about Capote's account of the crime is the way in which he highlights the arbitrary, almost accidental nature of it, the way it really could have happened to anyone, or not happened at all. Overall I'd call this a solid and impressive effort... not quite an all time favorite, but still very good. |
JMack (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-28 00:00>
Truman Capote was so disturbed by this book that he was never able to complete another work. This is symptomatic of the intensity of In Cold Blood. In completing this "nonfiction novel", Capote helped create the genre of true crime. He set the standard of the genre so high, it is virtually unattainable.
The greatest facet of this book is not the story itself as much as it is the presentation of the story. There are far more enticing stories of crime in American history. However, Capote takes this story of execution style murders in Holcomb, Kansas and tells the tale in the poetic style similar to his works of fiction. While it is slow moving at times, Capote crafts the perfect word in almost every scenario.
The relationship that Capote developed with the killers also gives us tremendous insight. Long before "Dead Man Walking", this book made a veiled swipe at capitol punishment. While America culture abhors violence, it answers violence with more violence.
Being a fan of the true crime genre, I regret not reading this book sooner. I suspect the movie "Capote" will cause others to discover this book, as it did for me. I hold In Cold Blood in very high regard. |
M. D. Stern (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-28 00:00>
Capote presents a well-balanced and chilling account of the Clutter murders that occurred in 1959. Unlike some true crime books, Capote never forgets the victims. In fact, the reader is constantly aware of Mr. and Mrs. Clutter and their two children, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter, how each died and how each lived.
On the flip side, while Capote goes into the background of the killers and explains their mental makeup, the reader is never given the impression that sympathy is to be given for these two. Capote spells out the facts of the case in a very engaging manner, while never for once letting the reader forget that these two men are not little lost stray puppies.
His balance and sensitivity are what makes this book such an interesting read. It is not merely a treatise on the drama of what happened in the courtroom. Nor is it necessarily what type of forensic evidence was determined to find these two guilty. It is more a study of how the murders were committed, the aftermath of what happened, how the killers were caught, and a exploration of trying to find out what makes a person do what these two did.
Capote captured what a true crime story should be - and in fact did create the genre. While others have come close in their intensity and horror, In Cold Blood, goes deeper in exploring that all illusive entity: the criminal mind. |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-28 00:00>
This is probably Capote's crowning achievement. Unfortunately it also destroyed him.
The storytelling is compelling and we get to know the characters better than in any book I've ever read (other than biographies). Even though we know how the story ends (it's history plus it tells us on the back of the book), the fun is in getting there. Much of the book has the feeling of a mystery novel. While we know who did it right off the bat, we find ourselves eagerly turning page after page to find out how and why.
Once we discover that, it sort of feels like the book should be over. But it continues for quite a bit more, covering the trial and the time the perpetrators spend waiting for their execution. To understand why, I suggest watching the movie "Capote". The story isn't really complete until you understand how the author was involved.
Though Capote was still young when he wrote this, he never finished another book. He put all of himself into the project and was never quite whole afterwards. You really should check it out. |
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