Book review: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote. Penguin Modern Classics.

My Book Club`s choice for the month had me re-read `In Cold Blood,` this tour de force account of a gruesome set of murders committed in 1959, in Holcomb, agrarian Kansas.

The facts, for those who wouldn`t know, are as follows. Two drifters,  Smith and Hancock,  had just been released from Kansas State Penitentiary. Hancock had been told of a wealthy farmer Herbert Cutler who lived in a relatively remote area and who had a safe with large amounts of cash in it. Ergo,they were en route to  `a perfect score. `

The deadly duo broke into the house early one morning in November 1959. They didn’t find the safe though they looked hard…simply because Herb Cutler dealt in cheques and there was no safe at his house. Smith and Hancock then murdered Herb and Bonnie Cutler and their teenage children Nancy and Kenyon. Herb Cutler had his throat cut, as Smith described, the others were shot at very close range in the head.

What did the two take away from the scene of the crime? A pair of binoculars, a portable radio and 50 dollars. Smith and Hancock were arrested and tried in March 1960. Both pleaded temporary insanity, both were pronounced sane. After five years on Death Row, they were hanged in April 1965.

Capote went to Kansas, got access to Smith and Hancock, interviewed locals; it took him five years to write what he called a `non-fiction novel` which set the bar very high for true crime books. It was immediately hailed as a ground-breaking masterpiece; it still ranks as the second highest-selling ‘true crime’ book in history (after Vincent Bugliosi’s account of the Charles Manson murders Helter Skelter ); it has never been out of print in five decades.

Literary flourishes

Turns out, Capote chose story over truth, and later on, several points  were red-flagged for being misrepresentations of the truth. Be that as it may, what the reader gets is a chilling look at the back stories of the two murderers, their utterly conscience-free acts, and how a trusting town turned intensely fearful and suspicious.

The piece of irony in this tale is that while the book earned Capote money and fame, he never did get the Pulitzer Prize for In Cold Blood. His  “assistant researchist” and good friend Harper Lee, who went to Kansas with him, went on to write To Kill A Mockingbird and won the Pulitzer Capote so dearly coveted.  The rest, as they say, is history.

My copy featured Richard Avedon`s famous portraits of the killers on the cover, and had me looking again and again at them with horrified fascination all through the reading.

Read this book if you are a crime fiction aficionado. Read this book even if you are not a fan of the genre, it`s such a well-written book.