In Cold Blood

"How narrative non-fiction can be masterfully written."

"It’s the story of the murder of a family in Kansas in 1959, written by Truman Capote. It was a bestselling, instantly famous book, which he described as a ‘nonfiction novel.’ I read it in the 1980s, about 20 years after it was written, and I was really astonished by it. I found it amazing that true stories could be told this way. I’ve since learned more about the circumstances of its writing, and I realised that Capote had invented or elaborated some aspects of the case. So the book’s an inspiration to me, but also a warning about how far one should go in terms of appropriating a story and imagining the feelings of others. In the book, Capote presumes to go inside the heads of his subjects, the murderers, and he invents dialogue. He doesn’t observe the same constraints as most factual writers and historians. In Cold Blood lies right on the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. Yes, but this book excited me when I read it because I thought it was true to what happened, rather than to Capote’s imagination. There are also ethical issues that arise from Capote’s relationships with the killers, and his vested interest in when they were executed. In writing about real life, you might not only manipulate the facts of the story, but you might manipulate events in the outside world. Capote sails very close to the wind on that, in a way that’s cautionary."

"One of the reasons I like this true crime novelisation is down to the fact it was so out of character for Capote and took everyone by surprise. It is also an excellent, almost biographical, insight into the two young killers’ minds."

"I read In Cold Blood when I was in college. I was working part time as a Pinkerton security guard at a General Electric plant in Richmond, Virginia to help pay for college. I had to make rounds throughout this huge complex, when I worked the midnight-to-8am shift. It was just me in this massive facility. And this place had so many ways to kill you. As I was instructed by the guard who was taking me around before my shift started, “If you touch that, you’re dead. If you open that door, you’re dead. If you see that leaking, you’re dead.” I remember thinking “I’m being paid three dollars an hour. I’m not going to any of those places!” So, I just sat in my guard shack and read In Cold Blood . It chilled my blood. No pun intended. There was this random confluence of misinformation and bad facts that led to the Clutter family being massacred in their home at night in Kansas. There were two crooks—Hickock and Smith—and they were in prison. Hickock had a cellmate who said he knew about this guy Clutter, who was a farmer and made a ton of money which he kept in the safe in his house. “You might want to think about going out there and getting it.” So, Hickock gets out of prison and enlists his buddy Perry Smith, an ex-con, to come and do it. They go there, break into the house, tie them all up—two adults and two teenagers; a daughter, son, husband, and wife. By all accounts, the Clutter family was a great family. Herbert Clutter was a very fair employer for all his farmhands and was well thought of in the community. Hickock and Smith look everywhere for the money and find that there’s no safe and no money. They feel that they can’t leave witnesses behind who know who they are, so they kill them. Hickock and Smith initially get away, but are quickly tracked down and brought to justice. Truman Capote had been given a couple of possible short story assignments for The New Yorker . But he had read a New York Times story about the Clutter family murder and decided to write a non-fiction account of it. And this was late 1950s, early 1960s Kansas. Truman Capote was obviously a gay man, and he thought if he went to Kansas, given who he was and what he looked like then, they wouldn’t talk to him; they might even hurt him. Thus, he enlisted his good childhood friend Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird , as a research assistant, and they both went to Kansas. He just became like a detective—he collected thousands of pages of notes, interviewed lots of people, and wrote what he termed to be the first nonfiction novel. In Cold Blood chronicles all of this up to the executions of Smith and Hickock by hanging in the 1960s. The book came out and was a huge success. It was one of the highest selling non-fiction novels of all time after Helter Skelter (about the Manson murders). It really boosted Capote’s career. He thought it was going to win all the awards and it ultimately didn’t—he was very upset about that. But he obviously made a lot of money and it was great for his career. Later on, I think he got some criticism because people felt like he’d invented some episodes in the book. The basic story he told was accurate, but he did romanticise some of it. I guess as a novelist he couldn’t resist. “There was this random confluence of misinformation and bad facts that led to the Clutter family being massacred in their home at night in Kansas” Perry Smith was the one he really focussed on. He was the smaller one who was probably bipolar, even though that wasn’t a diagnosis back then. He was the one who started killing the Clutters in a rage and Hickock felt he had no choice but to join in. But he had just the most incredibly devastating childhood—everything bad that could possibly happen to a young kid happened to Perry Smith. I think Capote really developed a connection with him. They became close and he visited him on death row in Kansas. So, it was a monumental effort by Capote and Harper Lee to put all of this together. In some of my books, I’ve taken to heart that if you turn right instead of left, either nothing will happen to you, or something really bad will happen to you just because of a seemingly random confluence of events. I learned that lesson vividly from In Cold Blood . I try to go to all the places I write about and interview as many people as I can. Wikipedia is great for certain discrete facts—like what kind of bullet goes in this weapon, or what is the population of this place—but for the in-depth stuff, you need to talk to human beings. I make a list of the places I have to visit and put together a list of people I need to interview, and then I go and do that. Like a journalist, I try to prepare myself ahead of time so that I don’t go in cold. I’ve learned over time that the one thing you don’t want to do is to go in there without being prepared. You have to respect their time. I try to ask open questions, to have conversations. Then, you get away from the cold hard facts of whatever you’re researching and more into the human side of what people think about these things. What are the things they don’t write down in the books about how certain jobs are done? That’s the fascinating, interesting thing. I spend a lot of time doing that with each book. But then the hard decision comes where you have to leave most of that out. I’m not writing a textbook; I’m writing a novel. I don’t want to interrupt the story-flow by dumping a bunch of facts in there that the reader doesn’t need to know. So, I try to give them exactly what they need to know to follow the story, and then move on. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s truly tough because you’re proud of the research—I might have a thousand pages of research and then only use two pages in the entire book. You feel like it’s a waste, but it’s not a waste because all the research you did allowed you to immerse yourself into that subject matter so vividly that you could distil a thousand pages down into two pages that truly matter to the story. By distilling it down and leaving most of it out, you actually did a far better job than a writer who stuffs it all into the novel."

"the two best individual works of narrative nonfiction remain "In Cold Blood," by Truman Capote, and "Hiroshima," by John Hersey."

"Oh, and In Cold Blood. That gave me nightmares for weeks."

"I think in all honesty it is one of the finest books ever written. Capote set out to write essentially a novel written in a novel style but about a true story. This was the story of Herbert Clutter, a wealthy farmer, his wife and two of their children who were all murdered in Holcomb in Kansas. Capote is an example of someone who literally committed his life to creating something. It took him six years to finish it because he had to wait for the court case and the final verdict which was the two perpetrators being executed. And there were all these connections with Harper Lee. He grew up alongside her and she went on to be his researcher when he went for the initial interviews with people in Holcomb. While she was researching In Cold Blood with him she heard that her book, To Kill A Mockingbird had been accepted for publication. The film Capote was made while he had still yet to complete In Cold Blood , and he went to the premier and the film won an Oscar; meanwhile Harper Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird. Even Norman Mailer published an article which said that there was a very strong possibility that they co-wrote both books. These are two of the most important works of contemporary American fiction. To Kill a Mockingbird is read by every child. In Cold Blood made Capote the most respected and highly-paid writer in America for probably 20 years. Yet, neither of them published again in their lifetimes. She went into reclusion, playing golf and sitting in the back of courts listening to court cases in a tiny little village in America. And he moved to New York and spent the next 20 years using however much money he made to drink himself to death. The whole thing is shrouded with mystery and curiosity. In Cold Blood is one of the rare books that I read, got to the end, and turned back to page one and started again. I think it is a bit of a Marmite book. Fifty per cent of people who read it love it and 50 per cent hate it. The language is very literary for a non-fiction book and I think he did something quite extraordinary. The New Yorker published it in four serials in four magazines – one a month in its entirety, which is the only time The New Yorker has devoted all of its pages cover to cover to one publication. I think that it was 1959 and it was the first time something so shocking and horrific as these four murders had been made so broadly public because of television and radio. I think that it horrified and scared people. Prior to that, they had had organised crime with people like Pretty Boy Floyd and the Italian-American organised crime families. I think this classic case really brought heinous crime into the living room for the first time and it was publicised so broadly and now had this celebrity connected to it. And the huge promotion of the book and tantalising readings that he did prior to the publication of the book made it all very popular. There was this buzz that was created about it."

"There are also treasures like signed books by friends (Tom Clancy, Annie Leibovitz, John Jakes, to name a few) and of course a few precious finds such as signed first editions of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”"

"It would be a tossup between "The Soccer War," by Ryszard Kapuscinski, and "In Cold Blood," by Truman Capote."