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A review by mithilareads
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
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