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In Cold Blood, in detail
Truman Capote's account of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas — and of the investigation, capture, trial, and execution of the killers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock — is the founding document of the true crime genre and one of the most admired works of American nonfiction of the twentieth century. Capote reported it over six years, conducting hundreds of interviews, and published it first in The New Yorker in 1965 before it appeared in book form. He called it a "nonfiction novel" — a claim that generated controversy about the form's truth obligations that continues today.
The book opens with Holcomb itself — the flat Kansas landscape, the Clutter farm, the orderly prosperous life the family had built — before moving to the planning of the robbery that became a mass murder. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock had been tipped off by a former Clutter employee that the farmer kept a safe full of cash; the safe did not exist. Hickock wanted money and was prepared for violence; Smith was more ambivalent, though it was Smith who killed all four members of the family. Capote renders both men in full, giving particular attention to Smith, whose background of poverty, abuse, and frustrated artistic ambition he clearly found compelling.
The investigation and trial sections document the Kansas Bureau of Investigation's methodical work, the community's fear, and the eventual arrest of Smith and Hickock in Las Vegas. The legal proceedings, and the long years on death row that followed, are where Capote's relationship with the killers — especially Smith — becomes most fraught. He visited them repeatedly and by his own account formed a genuine attachment to Smith. Whether this attachment compromised his account is a question he could not fully answer, and the book does not pretend to resolve it.
The execution scenes are rendered with meticulous precision. Capote was present at the hanging and recorded the final minutes with the same documentary care he applied to everything else. The book ends with a conversation at the Clutter grave — a meeting between the detective Al Dewey and the murdered daughter's friend, now a grown woman — that provides a kind of elegiac closure the event itself denied. Whether that closure is earned or sentimental is the reader's to decide.
The big ideas
- 1.
The 'nonfiction novel' form: Capote argued that journalism could use novelistic techniques — scene-building, psychological depth, dramatic structure — without sacrificing factual accuracy. In Cold Blood is the argument in practice.
- 2.
Empathy does not preclude justice. Capote renders Smith with enough depth that the reader understands him without being asked to excuse the murders.
- 3.
The Clutter family represents a specific American ideal — rural prosperity, religious faith, civic virtue — and the murders are partly an attack on that ideal. The book mourns both the people and what they stood for.
