Customer Reviews

In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (Modern Library)

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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.

I didn't expect this book to move me so deeply. In most true crime books that are written today (at least in my experience), the evidence is presented straightforwardly, unemotionally; the facts are dry and textbook-like. Such is not the case with IN COLD BLOOD. 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.

And this is the genius of IN COLD BLOOD: It is a violent, unflinching account, sorrowful beyond belief (and made even more so because it's true); 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. This book made me sad, it made me shiver; but I'm glad I read it.

The magnificence of "In Cold Blood" doesn't lie in the subject matter but in its treatment. There are--unfortunately--more depraved criminals and more elaborate police investigations detailed in a great many "true crime" accounts. But I doubt that any of them is as well written as "In Cold Blood."

I haul my copy out every 2-3 years just to remind myself how wonderful the rhythms and nuances of the American language can be at the hands of a master. I am totally drawn into the lives of the prosperous and completely unsuspecting Clutter family of western Kansas and the two drifters, Perry and Dick, who by themselves didn't amount to much but together proved lethal that fall night in 1959.

A trivia note: Capote's research assistant on this book was Nell Harper) Lee, who shortly after would become famous as the author of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

I'd recommend Gerald Clarke's excellent biography "Capote" to learn about this one-of-a-kind book, its creation, reception, and how it affected the author's life.

I received Truman Capote's In Cold Blood as a gift, and this book is a true gem in the true crime genre.

Herb Clutter was a wealthy rancher and prominent citizen of Holcomb, Kansas. In 1959, Clutter, his wife, and his two teenaged children were brutally murdered in their home. The killers are two paroled criminals, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, and they think that they have executed the perfect crime. Their involvement is no surprise as Capote introduces them at the beginning of the book. Capote chronicles the search for the killers by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (the KBI).

Capote writes In Cold Blood in a folksy, easy going style. He goes from one character to another, seamlessly switching from the third person to the first, and then back again. His down-home descriptions mirror Kansas in a simpler time. Capote writes about the jury "Not everyone was attentive; one juror, as though poisoned by the numerous spring-fever yawns weighing in the air, sat with drugged eyes and jaws so utterly ajar bees could have buzzed in and out." Capote also shows surprising empathy for the murderers, and Hickock and Smith accumulate a few fans.

Although In Cold Blood is 41 years old, reading it now couldn't be more timely. First, the film, Capote, was recently released. In Cold Blood became his most successful book. Also, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields was just published. Lee and Capote were neighbors, friends and collaborators. Lee did much of the research for In Cold Blood, and Capote rewarded her by dedicating this book to her (along with Jack Dunphy). I'm sorry it took so long for me to read this classic and I now have to follow up In Cold Blood with these two works.

I have meant to read this book for some time. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that seeing the Capote film is what finally induced me to read it, but I suppose that must be true. I had seen the film the previous weekend, bought this book during the following week, and just this past weekend, devoured it in all of two days.

Capote's masterpiece tells the story of the senseless, brutal killing of a rural Kansas family in 1959. It is beautifully written from start to finish -- in an understated way. If you come into this experience, as I did, conscious of the narcissism of the author, you might be surprised at the writing style. It is very humble, no Joycean or Nabokovian literary showing off. The story is paramount; the author does an amazing job of staying invisible, and respecting that story.

Respect is the feeling that is conveyed throughout the book. The telling is very respectful of the Clutter family; you learn of what remarkable people they were, even as they met their ends. The author is also fundamentally respectful of the people of the town, and of the local law enforcement. The book is not without its implied questioning of the judicial process, but again, I greatly appreciated the empathy and respect that pervaded the book.

This fundamental respect for human dignity even, in a more disturbing way, pervades even the discussion of the lives of the killers. The author candidly relates the biographies of these two men. On one level, this conveys an understanding of how they came to be what they were, but on a deeper level, it's all still a mystery. Left unanswered, still, is what really causes a man to be a killer. There is a great sense of tragedy throughout the relating of their formative lives -- perhaps not a respect for who they eventually were, but a respect for who they *could* have been.

Extremely unsettling is the sheer randomness of it all. The chain of events that causes the Clutter family to be killed is so random, so out-of-the-blue. Capote conveys how thin is the line between everything all seeming well and orderly in the world, and disaster striking out of nowhere.

Also coming through very clearly in this book is a cultural moment in time. You read it, feeling that this rural Kansas society is a vanished world. It's a stoic, God-fearing community, but the urban Capote betrays little condescension toward it. Quite the opposite; he seems duly impressed that the only reaction from the crowd to the killers' transference back to the town is one of silence -- no attempted violence, no shouted insults. The restraint and dignity of the townspeople amid this tragedy seems foreign to modern eyes. I found myself liking these people very much, despite my own preference for urban living.

But nothing undoes the basic feeling of tragedy that pervades the book. The author sifts through an incredible amount of detail about the crime; information that could only have been gleaned with a tremendous amount of cooperation from the killers themselves. There are details here that we could never have known about unless both killers had related them in their own separate interviews: details both of the crime itself, and of their activities, and further crimes and near-crimes, when on the lam.

The final portrait is of two worlds colliding -- a dysfunctional, violent world amid the undercurrents of society, rising up to strike the normal, orderly world of the Clutter family. It leaves the reader feeling as though nothing can be truly safe in our world, as long as the mysteries behind this story remain unresolved.

A resurgence of interest in the life and work of an author occurs rather frequently. It happened with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Such is the case today with Truman Capote, probably due in large part to the acclaimed film "Capote" with an award-winning performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

There is another fine performance in store for us with the audio edition of what many consider to be Capote's masterpiece, In Cold Blood, read by Scott Brick. A winner of AudioFile's coveted Golden Voice Award as well as several Earphone Awards, Brick is a veteran of film, television and radio work who seems to read with an intuitive sense of the author's intention. It has been said of him that "He lets the author's words do the work." Wisely so, especially in the case of this novel which, upon publication in 1966, Life Magazine called "A masterpiece.....a spellbinding work."

As many know, this is the book in which Capote detailed the 1959 murders of a wealthy farm family in Holcomb, Kansas. It was, as Capote described it a "non-fiction novel" because the events were true yet he described them in literary form. It was a crime that shocked the nation, the slaying of Herb Clutter, his wife, and teenage son and daughter. There was no apparent reason for the carnage that took place in their home.

When Capote read of the murders in the New York Times, he and his friend Harper Lee (To Kill A Mockingbird) went to Kansas where they interviewed the citizens of Holcomb and investigators. He would later have access to the two men apprehended for the killings. Capote spent years writing his novel, which is by turns a fascinating psychological study of two sociopathic murderers and an unforgettable portrait of a crime and its aftermath.

- Gail Cooke

This book hasn't really dated since it was written. With the exception of a few references to the years, it could be set in a present-day world. Capote takes us on a through the lives of the Clutter family before they were brutally murdered one Saturday night. He intertwines the lives of their killers and the men who found them and the result is a gripping, nail-biting tale of a brutal crime and the people involved. From time to time you have to remind yourself of the fact that all this really happened...

The audio presentation of "In Cold Blood" is particularly memorable as the narrator, Scott Brick, is one of the best readers I have ever heard. He brings Capote's book to life, complete with voices and accents. Coupled with excellent writing, Brick keeps us tense and excited throughout the book. I spent many evenings not wanting to get out of my car at home as I didn't want the book to end.

If you're new to audio books, this is an excellent one to start with.

Mr. Capote did us a great service in probing every facet of the tragic murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. But for his careful research and lucid prose, the courage of the Clutters, and the savagery of their murder, made all the more tragic by the quality of the family's character, might well have gone unrecognized. Although our era scarcely needs another shocking crime about which to read, In Cold Blood is worth re-visiting. At one level, Capote's book reminds us just how much has changed in a relatively short span of time. It is almost impossible in today's world to imagine reporters waiting anxiously in Holcomb for the return by car of the accused killers; now, even cities of modest size would have dispatched any number of helicopters to hover over the vehicles in transit and the footage would be delivered to our living rooms, and we would find ourselves addicted to the sound of the copters and the chatter of reporters. At another level, the book shows how little has changed. The murder of the Clutters is a modern story, a sad precursor to our own violent times. Capote knew that Holcomb, Kansas was a tale of innocence lost after the passing of the Clutter family. Now we know it was not just Holcomb's loss.

I am almost embarrassed to admit that I couldn't put this book down. Embarrassed because in essence it is a hard core voyeuristic experience. You will in fact end up attending a movie awash in unabashed bathos and violence...and it will be very hard to avert your eyes. While Capote had to be aware of this effect...I dare anyone to get the picture of Nancy Clutter out of their mind... he ends up having bigger fish to fry. The psychological constructs of the killers are remarkably fresh for a book written in the mid-sixties. The issues of the pernicious effects of child abuse (one of the killers, Perry Smith was abused) were not to be thrust into the public's consciousness for another 20 years, yet Capote has a very modern feeling for the features of the abused persona. Equally prescient was Capote's portrait of major depression as suffered by the soon-to-be-murdered Mrs. Clutter. The picture is scarily accurate for a third person account of a disease that was still thought to a purely psychological problem back in those days. It is SO accurate one has to wonder if Capote was in fact recounting symptoms he in fact had felt at one time or another ...anywhichway, still an eye-opener for something written in the sixties. I's also hard to leave this book without having to confront some very basic questions regardng good, evil and the purpose-of-life. If you haven't read this book, do..it is the book least likely to be put down during a long plane trip.

This "nonfiction novel" by Capote is truly a masterpiece. I remember trying to read it as a teenager and finding it too harsh, which is certainly an argument for returning to reread books in adulthood!

In painstaking detail, Truman Capote describes the lives of the Clutter family of Kansas so clearly, and with such precision, that we feel that we know them and we are shattered when four out of six family members are brutally murdered.

He employs equally descriptive characterizations for Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, two troubled ex-cons who set off on a cross-country car trip, hoping to rob the well-to-do Clutters and destroy all eyewitnesses.

I read a quote by Capote today in one of his other books where he said that one of the hardest things about writing In Cold Blood was trying to keep himself out of it. He succeeded beautifully. Although it was he who interviewed the Clutters' neighbors, townsfolk and family of the murderers, the book is written in such a way that the interviewer himself is invisible.

So is his bias, if he had one. The gruesome acts of cruelty committed against the Clutters made me -- a staunch opponent of the death penalty -- rethink my position. Then later on, when I read about the sad childhoods of the killers, particularly that of Perry Smith, I was ambivalent about whether or not they should have been sentenced to death. I believe that Capote wanted us to have both of these emotions -- empathy and revulsion.

He would certainly roll over in his grave today if he knew how long it took for a typical death penalty case to be tried or how much money was involved in all of the appeals.

My only complaint about In Cold Blood is that very little was said about the two remaining Clutter family members. Perhaps this was deliberate. Capote may not have wanted to further intrude on their privacy and grief, but that omission left me wondering how they could have possibly coped with the demolition of the rest of their family.

Fantastic book. Highly recommended.

Sigrid Macdonald

So many books to read and so little time to do so means that I won't usually read a book for a second time unless I feel the book has something special to offer that draws me back to it. Recently re-read this disturbing factional story of unspeakable horror after some thirty-odd years, revisiting the pain of Holcomb, the scene of the tragic, senseless snuffing out of the Clutters. Controversial on its publication due to its blending of fact and fiction, a hybrid composite that had not been done before, Capote's "In Cold Blood" grippingly reconstructs, in all their brutal detail, the 1959 grisly, cold-blooded murders of the Clutter family on their farm in the plains of western Kansas when four shotgun blasts changed the town of Holcomb forever. This fictionalising of real events, complete with imagined dialogue between real-life characters, broke new ground and established Capote as the inventor of True Crime "non-fiction novels".

Capote reconstructs the lead-up to the gruesome murders and the aftermath. In the lead-up, Capote cross-cuts intermittently between descriptions of the routine domestic life of the Clutters in their small farming community near Holcomb and the transient lives of the drifters Smith and Hickok - what's chilling is their humaness in the picture Capote draws - as they drift cross-country towards Holcomb. The aftermath comprehensively covers the search for and apprehension of the killers and their subsequent trial and incarceration on death row.

Capote's case-study is concerned not just with the who of the crime but the why, probing into every facet of the lives of the killers, the background influences that shaped them, taking us into their minds to give us the opportunity to get to know them, exploring the psyche of the criminal mind to discover the psychological motivation that can turn men into monsters. A forerunner of classic true-crime titles such as "Fatal Vision" by Joe McGinnes, "Daddy's Girl" by Clifford Irving and "Blood and Money" by Thomas Thomson, "In Cold Blood" is itself, an American classic and one of the best American books of the 20th Century .