After having watched the outstanding film Capote, essentially about Truman Capote’s experiences researching the grisly murders of a family in rural Kansas in 1959, I was compelled to read In Cold Blood, the product of the six grueling, emotionally trying years of said research. The movie asserts that the novel simultaneously established the author as the most famous writer in America and ruined him both emotionally and physically; he never finished another book and subsequently became addicted to both alcohol and drugs. I was intrigued and, I admit, a little scared. I mean, if the material inside those pages could scar someone as urbane and jaded as Truman Capote, what would it do to me?
First of all, it should be noted that In Cold Blood, while written like an extremely well crafted work of fiction, is not the product of an overactive imagination. It’s all real. That’s the frighteningly haunting part. It is a non-fiction literary novel, a genre created by Capote and of which he still reigns as king, which means that it’s all, whether you like it or not, factually-based. I have yet to come across a non-fictional book that is half as full of description and deeply developed “characters” as is In Cold Blood. And, perhaps I never shall.
Published in 1965, the novel is dedicated to both Jack Dunphy, Capote’s longtime lover, and Harper Lee (who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird), his lifelong friend. The first few pages immediately set the scene and tone for the rest of the book, much like the opening scene of a movie (Capote also wrote the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was then made into the movie starring Audrey Hepburn). You are guided into the world inhabited by the subjects and feel yourself leaving the present behind. Welcome to Holcomb, Kansas, the (unlikely) scene of the crime.
Equal parts bleak and joyful, Holcomb is a small tight-knit community that seems like an ideal place to grow up and then quickly move away. Despite the flat prairie lands that mercilessly expose one to the elements, Holcomb and the nearby town of Garden City were really quite sheltered. That is until November 1959, when one of the community’s most-popular and best loved families, The Clutters, were murdered for no apparent reason, shot point blank in the heads, with the father also having his neck slit. After this tragedy, things just weren’t the same in good old Holcomb.
The film doesn’t really go into the family’s background or the townspeople and instead focuses more on the killers and Capote. Thus, I was slightly taken aback by the extent to which In Cold Blood delves into both the Clutters’ and the community’s lives as well as that of the two murderers. It’s so well constructed and pieced together that it’s difficult to fathom that it’s non-fiction and that the victims weren’t interviewed by Capote from the beyond the grave. I kept on asking myself, “How could he possibly know all this stuff?”
