In Cold Blood

5/5 Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is a true-crime epic that grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go. This isn’t just a story about a murder; it’s a deep dive into a Kansas town’s soul, with characters so real you feel their joys and fears. Capote’s writing is pure gold, painting Holcomb’s wide-open plains and cozy homes with such vividness I could smell the wheat fields. Every page crackles with detail, from the Clutter family’s warm routines to the killers’ twisted paths, making this 1959 tragedy feel alive and gut-wrenching. For someone who loves big stories and complex characters, this is a home run. The Clutters, the investigators, even the perpetrators—everybody’s fleshed out with care. You’ll ache for the family’s lost dreams and get chills watching the killers wrestle with their own demons. Capote nails the emotional payoff, weaving justice, loss, and quiet hope. One line sums up the story’s haunting grip: “Imagination, of course, can open any door—turn the key and let terror walk right in.” It’s a history lesson and a crime thriller rolled into one. I was skeptical about the hype, but this book earned every bit of praise. In Cold Blood is a masterclass in storytelling—deep, thrilling, and unforgettable. If you’re into history or crime, you will love this story.

Liked the bok. I hadn't read this before. Fast interesting book. Good character development. I do recommend this book for anyone.

"In Cold Blood" is an iconic non fiction book that is authored by an iconic fiction writer, Truman Capote. The story is about a real life, hideous violent crime that occurred in the State of Kansas in 1959. Although non fiction, the book has the style of fiction and reads as a hard crime thriller, "page turner". In a case such as this, I don't wish to say that I "enjoyed" this book. The crime is disgusting. However the writing is excellent. As a retired police investigator of violent felonies, the entire work had the ring of truth and reality for me. I had put off reading this book up until now for numerous reasons. As a student of literature and authors, I prefer to read books by authors in order of publication so that I can study the evolution, if any, of the author. Also, in this case, I am a retired police,officer suffering from PTSD. Therefore it was with a good deal of hesitation that I decided to finally read this work. I do need to report to you that I did indeed find it personally very painful. I have worked cases like this and they have stayed with me. In some ways, the old scars were opened To some extent. It was not as bad as I was afraid it would be. (I had asked others about this prior to reading the book.) Obviously all I know about this case is what I have read. Presuming the work is accurate, I can tell you this is what is like to arrive at the scene of a hideous violent felony in which there are no witnesses and no obvious leads, To a conscientious lead investigator, it is almost impossible to convey the feeling of near hopeless, forlorn, desolation that may descend upon "The Lead" in a case such as this. Truman Capote does a really good job in describing all of this. It proved extremely realistic to me. Of all the books that I have ever read, if I was instructing a course on homicide investigations, I am positive I could use this book as a core text. I know exactly how I would have worked this "job" after all of the primary work and leads had been run down. Often I was assigned cases such as this after the primary work was done, and the investigation had stalled. The police "caught a break" in this case. However the break came from exactly the type of source that I would have pursued. Believe me it is a complete pain to work a case this way, but it can be done proactively rather than waiting for a break. This is not "normal aberrant" behavior. This is a subset of aberrant behavior, that I refer to as "aberrant of aberrant". the very nature of which, that makes this job solvable... In summary, this is an excellent work of non fiction. The only hesitation I have in recommending this work is the hideous nature of the crime. This crime fits my personal definition of obscenity. However if you are a young detective assigned to violent crimes, and really want to learn and not just "Mail it in" this is the one.... Thank You for taking the time to read this review.

Capote took a terrible tragedy and crafted a work of surpassing sensitivity and humanity. His vivid prose leaps off the page and pulls the reader through the true events right to the very end. Gripping.

When a book like IN COLD BLOOD reaches the level of being a classic, there has to be a reason. Consider the following two excerpts: "The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them." "Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat." The former excerpt is from Capote's opening paragraph; the latter cointains his closing sentence. Both are extraordinary, especially for their time, in capturing the mood and poetry of a place in the middle of a true-life story of a horrific mass murder. As is certainly well known, IN COLD BLOOD is Truman Capote's magazine-article-turned full-length-docu-novel about the murders of four members of the Clutter family in their Holcomb, Kansas, farmhouse in November 1959. The two killers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, were ultimately caught, tried, sentenced, and executed, factual matters that are still commonly known today thanks to two recent movies about Capote's life and his efforts to write the book. Even at its publication, IN COLD BLOOD was not a detective story in the traditional sense, since everyone already knew the perpetrators and the case's eventual disposition. In an era when such incidents were reported either factually (newspaper style) or sensationally (crime magazine style), Truman Capote effectively created an entire new genre: journalism as art form. Writing with a level of descriptive detail about places and events that create a strong sense of immediacy in the reader's mind, he begins his story with a re-creation of the Clutter family's last day of life. The effect is profound and eerie, since these pages are read with a foreknowledge of death not shared by the real-life characters on the page. Capote builds his suspense masterfully, alternating between the movements of Hickock and Smith and those of the Clutters (husband and father Herbert, perennially sick wife and mother Bonnie, intelligent, tinkering son Kenyon, and All-American sweetheart daughter and town darling Nancy. As he brings the two parties closer and closer together, Capote continues to fill in background on their respective lives. By the time his orchestrated characters have reached their mutual, bloody crescendo, the reader is intimately acquainted with them as individuals and their respective life stories. Thus, the author gives us individuals with whom we are intimate as characters in a novel, yet they are real people about whom he is reporting in a senseless, horrifying mass murder story. This is Capote's genius and the source of his book's classic status - factual reporting that reads like a novel, displaying the intimacy with its characters that is normally reserved for the so-called "omniscient author," the one who can hear, share, and express his or her characters' most private thoughts and motivations. Capote's pacing and remarkable eye for detail never relent as the story moves from crime to investigation, arrest, and trial by jury. He maneuvered himself into a situation where he was privy to every detail of the police investigation; it is equally clear he had extended access to Hickock and Smith throughout their ordeal, up to and including their ultimate disposition. While it was doubtless a level of access no longer available to reporters or writers, Capote took maximum advantage of it in crafting his story. What comes out of it, surprisingly, is a tale of two socially maladjusted young men of above-average intelligence whose trial was of questionable fairness, particularly as regards the mental health of one of them (who was probably more criminally insane than scheming murderer). In one of the book's most telling moments, Capote recounts the reports that the court-appointed psychiatrist would have rendered had the judge (and Kansas state law at the time) allowed them to do so. IN COLD BLOOD is truly a master work by an effete, East Coast reporter who beat the odds (and prejudices, no doubt) and entwined himself in his story and the lives of its actors to an unheard-of degree. The result was, and is, more than just a gripping account of a horrendous crime. It is a study in criminality: its victims, its effect on their families and community, its perpetrators and their families, even on the law enforcement personnel involved in the investigation. One can hardly imagine a more finely drawn study of a single crime and its all-too-human impact, presented in a form that remains to this day a page-turner in the very best sense of that phrase.

This to me is one of the OG true crime stories, before the genre was really invented. Truman Capote is the man! Well and truly has a place in my top ten all time favourite books. If you love true crime and have not read this book, read it!

In Cold Blood is a fictionalization of a true crime drama that details accurately (although there has been some controversy about that) the events leading up to the cold-blooded murder of the Clutter family, father, mother, 17-year-old Nancy, and 16-year-old Kenyon in their farmhouse on the outskirts of Holcomb, Kansas, Nov. 15th, 1959. Truman Capote takes us into the minds of the killers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, how they met, planned, and executed what was intended to be a robbery without witnesses, how it all went awry, and what they did after the event. Hickock dropped Smith off at his hotel, then went home to his parents farmhouse, ate dinner, and slept the rest of the afternoon while his father and brother watched a ballgame on TV. His father said at the time, it was unusual for Dick to miss a game on the TV. Capote gets into the minds of members of the tight-knit community of Holcomb, and friends of the Clutters in nearby Garden City, where the family attended the Methodist church. He takes us behind the work of the detectives trying to solve these murders into their family lives, and their painstaking determination to solve a murder scene that revealed almost no clues. Despite the horror of the senseless, brutal murders of a family full of protestant work ethic and innocence of the criminal element of society, Capote's telling masterfully conveys the tragedy without ramming the sickening details down our throats. It is a calm retelling, well-organized in a manner that fills the reader with empathy and pathos for the community, admiration for the way the pieces of the case against Perry and Dick come together, and the feeling that justice was served. There is even a modicum of sadness for the murderers, and some understanding of the twisted way in which their lives evolved to be such a waste. But the sense of loss is reserved in its entirety for the Clutter family, the remaining two older sisters, one married, the other at university, and the grieving town. Even coming to this novelization in command of the facts of the story, one cannot help being drawn into the compelling prose and the attempt to convey the complex workings of the callous regard for life held by these criminals, and others with whom they shared the 2nd floor of the Segregation and Isolation Building of the Kansas State Penitentiary for Men. "In a south section of the prison compound there stands a curious little building: a dark two-storied building shaped like a coffin. . . Among the inmates, the lower floor is known as The Hole — the place to which difficult prisoners, the "hardrock" troublemakers, are now and then banished. The upper story is reached by climbing a circular iron staircase; at the top is Death Row." The early part of the novel alternates the stories of the four members of the family against the stories of Smith and Hickock; afterwards, it juxtaposes the efforts of friends to cope, killers to evade, and detectives to track. It is a seemingly long process. Capote spent countless hours over many years conducting interview. First, the friends of each of the victims, then, the criminals as they awaited trial, followed by several years of appeals, right up to their executions. There are, mercifully, no pictures in the book, benign or otherwise. Capote's prose is clear and precise enough to convey the tranquility of the Clutters' River Valley Farm; it is deft enough to put the more tragic images into our minds without the horrific reality of photos. There is speculation that the ending, where detective Dewey meets Susan Kidwell, a friend Nancy Clutter had planned to attend the University of Kansas with, at the gravesite of the Clutters: four graves gathered under a single gray stone, and quietly discusses how life has moved on, is pure fiction. We can only guess. But it is a nice way to close the book: Sue is at K.U., Bobby Rupp has married, the killers have been executed, and the Clutter graves are left "[under] the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat".

excelente!

An outstanding and powerful work of literature, even more impressive because it conveyed true crimes, a profound investigative insight, the vivid sense of time and place, and the atmosphere that cloaked the evil events carried out on November 15 in 1959, in Holcomb, Kansas. Truman Capote is an artist that painted every detail of the story with such a detailed flow that causes us to stop and appreciate the surroundings rather than wishing the story was being pushed at a faster pace. Looking at America in the 50s from the perspective of a foreigner we often think more of a Holywood version of an innocent age, affluent, white picket fences, apple pie, and rock and roll pervading the airwaves. If anyone asked me when and where I'd liked to have lived it would have been the US in the 1950s. In Cold Blood smashes that image with the reality that cruelty can take away life, a community’s character and the idyllic vision I'd imagined above. The murders of four of the Clutter family by Dick Hickock and Perry Smith for $40, stunned not only the population of Holcomb but ultimately a world-wide audience. My vision, I so wanted to believe of the US, couldn't have been better envisioned than by Holcomb in the 1950s, where families rarely locked their doors and the safety of the neighbourhood was never doubted. Hickock and Smith not only brutally destroyed the lives of four innocent people but destroyed the fundamental promise of safety in our own homes. The story explores the background of the murderers, what drove them, how they considered what they had done, the investigation into the crimes, and the community that became fearful and suspicious that for a long time they did not know who was responsible. To achieve this nonfiction novel with such beautiful prose is a seminal point in literature where it is arguable that Capote created a new genre. I have for a long time been fascinated by the relationship between Truman Capote and Harper Lee and how they helped each other research and draft their renowned classics. It is interesting that Harper Lee had been inspired during the ‘In Cold Blood’ collaboration with Capote to research and use the case of Robert Burns who shot dead the serial killer, Reverend Willie Maxwell, to write her own true-crime novel - which never materialised. Another relationship Capote shattered during his years of self-destruction. I do believe this is a must-read novel and is surely a classic and a powerful combination of true-crime with such beautiful writing talent.

Een intrigerend boek met niet alleen een walgelijke misdaad maar ook een boek over zeer menselijke daden goed en slecht. De schrijver geraakt hier even persoonlijk in betrokken als de speurder die er zijn levenswerk van maakt om de daders te vinden en er ook aan ten onder gaat. Hoe een gemeenschap ten onder gaat aan twijfel en schrik. Geen spannend boek maar zeer meeslepend en het houd je in zijn greep. Het kunnen lange nachten worden.