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directorpurry's review against another edition
dark
reflective
tense
slow-paced
4.0
It would be wrong, in many ways, to say I love this book. So I'm not going to.
Engaging with any type of true crime media, be it audio, visual, or literary, should bring prominent ethical questions to mind. (Believe me, I say this as a lover of all things true crime.) Thoughts of exploitation of the victims, the families, and sometimes the perpetrators, should be seriously considered. The closer the crime, the higher the cost. In this case, a book about a murder in 1959 being read (first sometime around 2013 and then a second time) in 2021 has a much lower feeling of exploitation than a book about a murder in 1959 being published in 1965 does.
In creating In Cold Blood, Capote did just as many things wrong as he did right. Reading this book is a deeply literary experience. Being a piece of history - not to mention a reread - there is considerably less suspense than, say, a brand new fiction novel. But the building sense of dread created in the first act is truly masterful. The audience knows what is going to happen, and yet... I knew exactly what was going to happen. I remembered the murder confessions in fairly explicit detail for reading this almost eight years ago; but I still found myself drawn into the story and carried along by the narrative force. The writing itself is poetic at times and plain at others, but always fitting the story this piece works so hard to tell.
When creating true crime media, I firmly believe that every action taken should be as respectful and ethical as possible in order to respect the dead, at the very least. The legacy of this book is far from spotless. Not only are there allegations that segments of this book were misleading, if not entirely fabricated, and Capote's methods of interview and investigation have been questioned both by contemporary witnesses and other journalists and authors after the fact.
There are times when the story is simply too convenient - elegant moments present themselves for a striking visual or convenient meetings and resonant conversations occur in a way that is particularly rare outside of a piece of fiction. Even while writing this review, I often found myself considering what descriptor to type out - was book or novel actually the word I wanted to use? The controversy of that line is certainly a mark against this book, but only in its ethos, not in its place in literary history or even the American consciousness of crime.
I certainly view this piece much differently than I did when I read this first as a 15-year-old. The way Perry Smith is presented as a particularly sympathetic player is both difficult and powerful. He is at once "the bad guy" and also just misunderstood. I think the first time I struggled to understand how that dichotomy was drawn - teenagers are not exactly known for their understanding of gray morality - but I see it a little better now. I can both condemn these men and understand how they saw themselves - not as the villains but misunderstood heroes. There are many depths to the human mind and it's very easy to misrepresent one's self - especially to one's self.
I don't research for my reviews, but I did for this one. Partly because I didn't want to misrepresent the controversies around this book, but also, at least a little bit, because I wanted to do what I could to respect the dead as well.
Engaging with any type of true crime media, be it audio, visual, or literary, should bring prominent ethical questions to mind. (Believe me, I say this as a lover of all things true crime.) Thoughts of exploitation of the victims, the families, and sometimes the perpetrators, should be seriously considered. The closer the crime, the higher the cost. In this case, a book about a murder in 1959 being read (first sometime around 2013 and then a second time) in 2021 has a much lower feeling of exploitation than a book about a murder in 1959 being published in 1965 does.
In creating In Cold Blood, Capote did just as many things wrong as he did right. Reading this book is a deeply literary experience. Being a piece of history - not to mention a reread - there is considerably less suspense than, say, a brand new fiction novel. But the building sense of dread created in the first act is truly masterful. The audience knows what is going to happen, and yet... I knew exactly what was going to happen. I remembered the murder confessions in fairly explicit detail for reading this almost eight years ago; but I still found myself drawn into the story and carried along by the narrative force. The writing itself is poetic at times and plain at others, but always fitting the story this piece works so hard to tell.
When creating true crime media, I firmly believe that every action taken should be as respectful and ethical as possible in order to respect the dead, at the very least. The legacy of this book is far from spotless. Not only are there allegations that segments of this book were misleading, if not entirely fabricated, and Capote's methods of interview and investigation have been questioned both by contemporary witnesses and other journalists and authors after the fact.
There are times when the story is simply too convenient - elegant moments present themselves for a striking visual or convenient meetings and resonant conversations occur in a way that is particularly rare outside of a piece of fiction. Even while writing this review, I often found myself considering what descriptor to type out - was book or novel actually the word I wanted to use? The controversy of that line is certainly a mark against this book, but only in its ethos, not in its place in literary history or even the American consciousness of crime.
I certainly view this piece much differently than I did when I read this first as a 15-year-old. The way Perry Smith is presented as a particularly sympathetic player is both difficult and powerful. He is at once "the bad guy" and also just misunderstood. I think the first time I struggled to understand how that dichotomy was drawn - teenagers are not exactly known for their understanding of gray morality - but I see it a little better now. I can both condemn these men and understand how they saw themselves - not as the villains but misunderstood heroes. There are many depths to the human mind and it's very easy to misrepresent one's self - especially to one's self.
I don't research for my reviews, but I did for this one. Partly because I didn't want to misrepresent the controversies around this book, but also, at least a little bit, because I wanted to do what I could to respect the dead as well.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Death, Gun violence, Violence, Blood, Murder, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Alcoholism, Animal death, Child abuse, Homophobia, Pedophilia, Suicidal thoughts, and Suicide attempt
Minor: Infidelity, Suicide, Vomit, and Religious bigotry
akissforcatullus's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
3.5
Well, where to start? I can’t say I haven’t been dreading writing a review—this being because I feel as though I cannot put properly into words what I feel. I’ll try, though. Finishing the book kindled an extreme heavy-heartedness, as well as a mourning-feeling for the family that deserved so much more time. The final paragraph of this novel tugged at my heart strings, and left me with an intense sense of emptiness.
My biggest qualm is how noticeably biased this book can be towards Perry. Now, this goes without saying that Perry’s tragic life does deserve sympathy, but, it just seems unreliable at times; invoking slight scepticism and concern as to whether something actually happened or was just contrived or hypothesised by the writer. This applies, too, with the Clutter family’s personal life. There are parts I feel that were added and elongated insincerely, like Bonnie’s illnesses and strifes. Also want to add, this book did initiate this momentary hyper-vigilance on my part. I usually am a kind of vigilant person, but upon reading this book I felt an already existing fear become substantiated and intensified. I can’t say it’s necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly was haunting.
Regardless of my personal negative emotion towards this book, it deserves credit for the sheer amount of effort put into it as well as its execution. I commend the writing for keeping me fairly interested despite my hesitance in continuing—of course certain chunks of information felt at times superfluous, but I appreciated it nonetheless. The unreliability, the—what essentially was—confirmation bias, the gruesomeness of the murders, the horrid themes, the occasionally tedious bits of information, all retracted a 4 star rating. I also didn’t feel pleased with giving it a 4 or higher star as I don’t particularly enjoy novels of this nature, no matter how well it may be written. I hope this review is coherent. I’m too tired to map out exactly what I wanted to say as well as what was said.
There’s a lot missing out. There’s a lot more I want to express, like my deep anguish for the poor family, and how certain parts of the novel will probably remain cemented in my mind, but I’ll leave it for you, dear reader, to experience it for yourself. (Edit: I advise you not to, actually. Thinking back on it now, I could’ve lived life perfectly fine having not read this book. So, no, despite how dedicated the author was, this is not a book I recommend.)
My biggest qualm is how noticeably biased this book can be towards Perry. Now, this goes without saying that Perry’s tragic life does deserve sympathy, but, it just seems unreliable at times; invoking slight scepticism and concern as to whether something actually happened or was just contrived or hypothesised by the writer. This applies, too, with the Clutter family’s personal life. There are parts I feel that were added and elongated insincerely, like Bonnie’s illnesses and strifes. Also want to add, this book did initiate this momentary hyper-vigilance on my part. I usually am a kind of vigilant person, but upon reading this book I felt an already existing fear become substantiated and intensified. I can’t say it’s necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly was haunting.
Regardless of my personal negative emotion towards this book, it deserves credit for the sheer amount of effort put into it as well as its execution. I commend the writing for keeping me fairly interested despite my hesitance in continuing—of course certain chunks of information felt at times superfluous, but I appreciated it nonetheless. The unreliability, the—what essentially was—confirmation bias, the gruesomeness of the murders, the horrid themes, the occasionally tedious bits of information, all retracted a 4 star rating. I also didn’t feel pleased with giving it a 4 or higher star as I don’t particularly enjoy novels of this nature, no matter how well it may be written. I hope this review is coherent. I’m too tired to map out exactly what I wanted to say as well as what was said.
There’s a lot missing out. There’s a lot more I want to express, like my deep anguish for the poor family, and how certain parts of the novel will probably remain cemented in my mind, but I’ll leave it for you, dear reader, to experience it for yourself. (Edit: I advise you not to, actually. Thinking back on it now, I could’ve lived life perfectly fine having not read this book. So, no, despite how dedicated the author was, this is not a book I recommend.)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Death, Racial slurs, Racism, Violence, Murder, and Toxic friendship
Moderate: Alcoholism, Emotional abuse, and Physical abuse
Minor: Homophobia, Pedophilia, and Suicide
mithilareads's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
5.0
Every true crime fan worth their salt has read this book, and after I finished reading this book and gave myself a gap of almost a day before sitting down to write this review, I realise why. In Cold Blood was a phenomenal change in the way true crime was reported: The fluidity of the story would, to someone who gets into the book without reading the blurb or without hearing about it from someone, make the book feel like a novel. I couldn’t help but stop in awe and appreciate random passages and try to glean from the book the thought process that went through Capote’s mind as he stitched various parts of the story into a beautiful tapestry. He obviously put in a lot of research while writing this account, yet everything is introduced at the right time.
Speaking of beautifully fluent pieces of prose, here’s the one that stopped me in its tracks and managed to stick around in my brain for a while longer than is normal. It’s the passage that precludes the description of the trial of the two murderers:
"Among Garden City’s animals are two gray tomcats who are always together – thin, dirty strays with strange and clever habits. The chief ceremony of the day is performed at twilight. First they trot the length of Main Street, stopping to scrutinize the engine grills of parked automobiles, particularly those stationed in front of the two hotels, the Windsor and Warren, for these cars, usually the property of travelers from afar, often yield what the bony, methodical creatures are hunting: slaughtered birds – crows, chickadees, and sparrows foolhardy enough to have flown into the path of oncoming motorists. Using their paws as though they are surgical instruments, the cats extract from the grilles every feathery particle. Having cruised Main Street, they invariably turn the corner at Main and Grant, then lope along toward Courthouse Square, another of their hunting grounds – and a highly promising one on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 6, for the area swarmed with Finney County vehicles that had brought to town part of the crowd populating the square."
I don’t feel the need to write a summary of the plot as I’m sure many of you have already read this book. So let me convince the 1% of people who haven’t read this book yet about why they should give it a shot:
1. Capote read about the quadruple murder before the killers were captured. Intrigued, he traveled to Kansas along with Harper Lee (of the To Kill a Mockingbird fame) to write about the crime. They interviewed the murderers and the residents of the farming community of Holcomb, Kansas and pieced together an omniscient view of the Clutter family murders. If this isn’t best-friendship goals, what is?
2. You know who the murderers are at the start of the book. You know who the victims are. Yet, you end up reading the book right up to the end. (In my case, I ended up getting night terrors after falling asleep post a reading session) Why? Various reasons: the insanity of the crime intrigues you and you hope for a satisfying conclusion about the motive behind the seemingly senseless crimes. While you don’t exactly get the answer you hope for, you learn that not everything in life makes sense. Shit happens, to put it colloquially.
3. What do you get instead of the perfect motive? You get a biography of the murderers themselves: Their beginnings. Their family life. Their history with crime, or the lack of it. Their abusive, reckless, runaway parents, or the absolutely dedicated ones who did their best to give their kid clothes to wear and food to eat. The polarity of their personalities, and the thread that spun them together. You’re given the freedom to make the decision for yourselves – do you sympathise with the murderers or want to bludgeon them too? What makes you feel that your decision is the right one?
4. We’re taken on a mad adventure of the murderers from one end of the country to another country, all the while trying to understand how their plan for the perfect crime tied into their goals of a rich future. How an insanely unresearched tip-off led to the senseless loss of four lives, lives which served the community in Holcomb, Kansas in ways that were parallelly destroyed by these murderers.
5. Capote reconstructs the life before the murder, the murder itself, the life after it in this book. But Capote also makes a case about the cons of capital punishment. There are many instances in the latter half of the book about the intermingling of the gray areas of religion and justice. But the most compelling argument against capital punishment in the book is the one which shows the role that mental illnesses play in lives of some (not all) people who resort to crime. A psychiatrist who examined both the murderers is not permitted to enter his findings in their trial: findings that one of the murderers may have suffered from schizophrenia and that the other may have lived with a severe character disorder. The way in which Capote unveils the psychiatrist’s statement is a mirror of the way mental illnesses were regarded in the courtroom of that age: not spoken out loud for everyone to hear.
To people (of whom there are many) who criticise this book saying that it didn’t stick to the actual details of the crime with a journalistic precision and instead window-dressed some of the failings of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI), I’d say, this is a non-fiction novel. History in itself, though it claims to be the actual factual truth, is also tinted by the glasses of the writer and their hidden agendas. I don’t deny or support any of the criticisms of the book as I’m a. just a reader like you b. I wasn’t alive in 1959 and c. I’m not qualified to critique the history of the book. To a reader who likes a good work of writing, this book was refreshing as I’ve seen nothing like this till date and I don’t even expect to.
A mandatory reading of the summary on SparkNotes has also informed about few more reasons about why Capote chose to sculpt this story in a way that appealed to the reader: the book was published a year after the sensationalised criminals were hung to death. Everyone and their grandmothers knew of the story, as the murder of the Clutter family was one of the first that lead to a spree of similar family murders over the country of USA. To put it a different way, the story needed to have a pinch of mirch-masala in order to attract the reader to an extensive coverage of the murder, reportage unlike anything that could have been found in a newspaper.
I will end this review by saying that it would be a literary crime to not give this book a read.
Speaking of beautifully fluent pieces of prose, here’s the one that stopped me in its tracks and managed to stick around in my brain for a while longer than is normal. It’s the passage that precludes the description of the trial of the two murderers:
"Among Garden City’s animals are two gray tomcats who are always together – thin, dirty strays with strange and clever habits. The chief ceremony of the day is performed at twilight. First they trot the length of Main Street, stopping to scrutinize the engine grills of parked automobiles, particularly those stationed in front of the two hotels, the Windsor and Warren, for these cars, usually the property of travelers from afar, often yield what the bony, methodical creatures are hunting: slaughtered birds – crows, chickadees, and sparrows foolhardy enough to have flown into the path of oncoming motorists. Using their paws as though they are surgical instruments, the cats extract from the grilles every feathery particle. Having cruised Main Street, they invariably turn the corner at Main and Grant, then lope along toward Courthouse Square, another of their hunting grounds – and a highly promising one on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 6, for the area swarmed with Finney County vehicles that had brought to town part of the crowd populating the square."
I don’t feel the need to write a summary of the plot as I’m sure many of you have already read this book. So let me convince the 1% of people who haven’t read this book yet about why they should give it a shot:
1. Capote read about the quadruple murder before the killers were captured. Intrigued, he traveled to Kansas along with Harper Lee (of the To Kill a Mockingbird fame) to write about the crime. They interviewed the murderers and the residents of the farming community of Holcomb, Kansas and pieced together an omniscient view of the Clutter family murders. If this isn’t best-friendship goals, what is?
2. You know who the murderers are at the start of the book. You know who the victims are. Yet, you end up reading the book right up to the end. (In my case, I ended up getting night terrors after falling asleep post a reading session) Why? Various reasons: the insanity of the crime intrigues you and you hope for a satisfying conclusion about the motive behind the seemingly senseless crimes. While you don’t exactly get the answer you hope for, you learn that not everything in life makes sense. Shit happens, to put it colloquially.
3. What do you get instead of the perfect motive? You get a biography of the murderers themselves: Their beginnings. Their family life. Their history with crime, or the lack of it. Their abusive, reckless, runaway parents, or the absolutely dedicated ones who did their best to give their kid clothes to wear and food to eat. The polarity of their personalities, and the thread that spun them together. You’re given the freedom to make the decision for yourselves – do you sympathise with the murderers or want to bludgeon them too? What makes you feel that your decision is the right one?
4. We’re taken on a mad adventure of the murderers from one end of the country to another country, all the while trying to understand how their plan for the perfect crime tied into their goals of a rich future. How an insanely unresearched tip-off led to the senseless loss of four lives, lives which served the community in Holcomb, Kansas in ways that were parallelly destroyed by these murderers.
5. Capote reconstructs the life before the murder, the murder itself, the life after it in this book. But Capote also makes a case about the cons of capital punishment. There are many instances in the latter half of the book about the intermingling of the gray areas of religion and justice. But the most compelling argument against capital punishment in the book is the one which shows the role that mental illnesses play in lives of some (not all) people who resort to crime. A psychiatrist who examined both the murderers is not permitted to enter his findings in their trial: findings that one of the murderers may have suffered from schizophrenia and that the other may have lived with a severe character disorder. The way in which Capote unveils the psychiatrist’s statement is a mirror of the way mental illnesses were regarded in the courtroom of that age: not spoken out loud for everyone to hear.
To people (of whom there are many) who criticise this book saying that it didn’t stick to the actual details of the crime with a journalistic precision and instead window-dressed some of the failings of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI), I’d say, this is a non-fiction novel. History in itself, though it claims to be the actual factual truth, is also tinted by the glasses of the writer and their hidden agendas. I don’t deny or support any of the criticisms of the book as I’m a. just a reader like you b. I wasn’t alive in 1959 and c. I’m not qualified to critique the history of the book. To a reader who likes a good work of writing, this book was refreshing as I’ve seen nothing like this till date and I don’t even expect to.
A mandatory reading of the summary on SparkNotes has also informed about few more reasons about why Capote chose to sculpt this story in a way that appealed to the reader: the book was published a year after the sensationalised criminals were hung to death. Everyone and their grandmothers knew of the story, as the murder of the Clutter family was one of the first that lead to a spree of similar family murders over the country of USA. To put it a different way, the story needed to have a pinch of mirch-masala in order to attract the reader to an extensive coverage of the murder, reportage unlike anything that could have been found in a newspaper.
I will end this review by saying that it would be a literary crime to not give this book a read.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Child abuse, Death, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Rape, Suicide, and Violence