I found this book only a couple years ago after watching the movie Capote starring Phillip Seymore Hoffman 2005. The description said it was about the author Truman Capote investigating a murder and writing a book about it. The movie was on my On-demand channel and my husband was out on a boy's night. It looked like a film he would never watch with me, so I got it and was enthralled 10 minutes later. I was thinking, "holy cow what is this book?" I had never really heard much about it. I had heard about Truman Capote only because of his smash hit Breakfast at Tiffany's. (He wrote that too.) So a week after I saw Capote, I bought the inspiration for the movie, In Cold Blood.
This story is about a family of four, the Clutters, who were systematically murdered in their home by 2 men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith in November 1959.
First of all, (and most importantly!) he CREATED a new genre of literature. Just MADE it up. The world of literature is broken up into 2 very separate worlds, fiction and non-fiction. Every library, book store, and probably most homes, have their books divided like this. Capote wrote a non-fiction novel. He meticulously researched the town, the victims, and the murderers to write an extremely detailed account of actual events while writing in the style of a fictional novel. The amount of detail laid out in the first section of the book, "the last to see them alive", is creepy. It is all conversations that each of the family member had with friends and neighbors on their last day along with a basic background description gleaned from members of the community they lived in. What enhances the creepiness is that Capote does this for the killers too. You learn the horrible details of their childhoods, all of the reasons why they were so messed up. You get to see the paths the fateful paths of people who only met once and it ended/changed so many lives. It is like being a spectator watching a car crash from inside both vehicles. You know its going to be bad, but its so interesting to know why and how it happened.
This is one of the best organized and thoughtful books I have ever read. Everything is there for a reason, and you learn things in the exact order you need them for maximum effect. If you know anything about this story (or read the back of the cover) you know what happened and who the murderers are. So the "who did it" is not the point of the novel. It most definitely is NOT a thriller, no twists in the story, no soap opera moments where everything turns on a dime. The way the plot was laid out, none of that was neccessary to hold your attention.
I think that the moral integrity needed to write a book like this is extraordinary. In the age of outrageous reality tv, lying politicians, and bankers just raping the economy with magical numbers, I don't believe anything anyone "famous or infamous" has to say. Public relations has turned us into a bunch of PC liars who will say anything to make a buck. Sorry, but I really belive that. In his time, Capote did not have the amount of PC garbage we have now, but he cold have made life easier for himself had he been more lax with the details. Capote did not add any flash or exagerrated details, he just wrote what happened to real people. That realness was his triumph and his downfall. No one minded him being so completely honest when the people he wrote about were dead, or genuine, simple people. When he decided to write another books in the same style involving socialites and hollywood big shots, he was inundated with negativity. He died not having any success even close to what he had with In Cold Blood.
The other point I have to make about this book involves the humanity of the killers. Capote goes to such great length into the past, every detail about their ultimate crime, and their two week spree following the murders. You can't help feeling a complicated mix of emotions about them. You can see their faults very clearly, but you can see their goodness too. They both had very, very hard lives in their own ways, which creates a boiling pot of rage and hatred when combined together. Had they never met, or been born today, maybe they would have been much better men, especially Perry. Capote felt deeply connected to these men, enough to witness their execution and purchase their grave markers.
Overall, this is a book everyone should read. A lot of this book is disturbing, but it should bring about some empathy for those less fortunate than you. Bad people do bad things to good people all the time, and it seems so insanely unfair. But if you take the time to examine a deeply flawed person like Capote did with Hickock and Smith, you can see how much a little help could have avoided so much pain. Hickock and Perry never saw value in life because their lives (through poor choices or shitty luck) had no value.
I'm including pictures of the people, places involved.
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