Capote's Masterpiece: In Cold Blood

Written by Truman Capote and published in 1966, In Cold Blood follows the true story of the murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas on November 15, 1959: After hearing about this quadruple homicide and before any killers were implicated, Capote and his friend Harper Lee traveled to Kansas and took thousands of pages of interview notes, which he then synthesized into a true-but-somewhat-fictionalized account of the people involved and events leading up to this tragic event.

Let me start out by saying that I loved this book. I think the most apt word to describe it is "page turner", for that it truly what it was. Yet it's not a mystery as many murder novels are, because from the beginning, you are introduced to the entire Clutter family, as well as the two murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. The plot thus unfolds as the events start to make sense: it's not "whodunit?", but rather "whytheydunit?".

In a literary sense, one of the main things I noticed is that the story is characterized by juxtaposition. Starting with the recreated last day of the Clutter family, the events are juxtaposed against the musings and plannings of the two murderers, who often delve back into their pasts to justify their actions and give the reader a sense of why they were doing what they were doing. After the Clutters were murdered, the focus switched to the fleeing murderers and their continued crime spree juxtaposed with the agony of the evidence-less investigation. Everything came together to make one stellar novel for a blogger exploring interpersonal relations.

Basically, this book is pregnant with people relating to people: the Clutter family relating to themselves, Herb Clutter's kindness to his employees (one of whom told Dick about the Clutter's whereabouts initially, which ultimately ended in their deaths), Nancy's gentle nature that caused her to be revered among the other youths in the town, Perry's rough relationship with his dysfunctional or dead family, Dick's abuse of the trust of his simple-minded his parents, the town postmistress' hatred of the gossiping neighbors... Pick any character, and a complex web can be drawn relating them to everyone else mentioned in the novel.

But the most poignant relationship between people in In Cold Blood concerns the residents of this sleepy town (population 270) and how the murder changed their lives. Neighbors who knew each other for thirty years began gossiping and speculating that the killer was among them; the crime was as mentally harmful to random townsfolk as it was to the remaining members of the Clutter family. Truman Capote puts it best when, on page 5, he says,

"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 neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers".

I give this book 5 stars out of 5. From what I understand, the film version is gruesome (though I've never actually seen it). But this book is tasteful when addressing the violence of this crime, getting into the mentality of the act rather than the gory details. It's simply fascinating.