While I love watching true crime series/movies, I have never really been into true crime in books. In Cold Blood is possibly my very first true crime novel, and I went in not knowing what to expect. I half expected a documentary with Truman Capote inserting his investigations and interviews into the story, but this book surprised me with the style. It’s not written in documentary format at all. Except for one or two allusions to actual events, I could have read this book like any other fictional crime novel.
About In Cold Blood
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.
~ Synopsis from goodreads
My Review
Like I mentioned earlier, this is not nonfiction as we traditionally define it. There are no mentions of sources, and the last days and thoughts of the various members of the Clutter family are purely a figment of his imagination. But the nub of the story is all true.
Because this story is true, I was surprised by how deeply I was affected by the book—the people and all their fates.
The first quarter of the book is slow, focusing on the last day of all the members of the Clutter family. It’s slow, but the authors’ deep character study made me really invested in these characters and feel terrible for their fates.
I also felt bad for one of the killers, Perry, and a part of me feels guilty for feeling so bad for him. I know it was Capote’s intention to humanise him, but I feel that Capote was pretty frank about the terrible deeds committed by Perry, and Perry himself seems upfront about how he killed the Clutters and his lack of remorse.
That being said, Perry executed four people. Two were kids. One was a kid he had saved from rape/SA and had spent time chatting with. I feel awful for the Clutters; I cannot imagine their suffering; dad’s throat was cut and he likely died knowing his family were doomed; his son Kenyon saw his dad die and his killer approach; the daughter Nancy heard them walking up the stairs and begged for her life; mom heard her kids get shot, possibly Nancy begging. It’s just appalling.
As I read on, I began to feel that for such kinds of murders, the death penalty actually makes sense. Nowhere in the book did the two killers show much remorse. They only seemed to feel bad that they got caught. I kept getting this suspicion that if they had a life sentence and got released early, they would have just continued on their murderous path.
I do have a major problem with the non-fiction novel label. Capote flat-out fabricated some incidents, including the ending at the cemetery with the policeman Al Dewey running into Nancy Clutter’s friend at the Clutters’ graves. That simply did not happen. Capote couldn’t figure out how to end the book, so he inserted this fictional coda. That isn’t how non-fiction should work.
However, it is an incredibly well-written true crime book I’ve ever read. Quite unforgettable.
