The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 11 July 2011
by Truman Capote
Americans, of course, are fascinated with crime. Even though the crime rate has dropped dramatically in the past few decades, one couldn't tell by what we see in the 24/7 news cycle, and our regular obsession with particular crimes. This is, of course, nothing new. Every few years ever since the beginnings of our country, we've been treated to another "crime of the century." We continue to experience violent crime and the occasional mass murder-suicide of a family doesn't dazzle us much any more. We reserve most of our outrage now for the crimes of celebrities, child murderers (even better if done by the parents), and the mass shootings that our gun-obsessed culture seems to necessitate on a regular basis. So, in these ever more jaded years, a book like In Cold Blood doesn't seem so very spectacular, but it made a pretty dramatic splash when it was published in 1965. The story is familiar, if also tragic, brutal, unjust and even frustrating. On a night in November 1959, two recently-paroled former prisoners from a Kansas state prison walked into a comfortable farmhouse in the tiny town of Holcomb intending to rob the inhabitants of a safe-full of money. There was no safe, and the men proceeded to shotgun to death the farmer, his wife and two of their teenaged children. Leave no witnesses, they insisted. The crime was spectacularly brutal, and seemingly without clear motive. For weeks, the murderers eluded capture, traveling ten thousand miles back and forth across America and through Mexico, trying to merely forget what they had done. Truman Capote, the teller of short brilliant stories, might have seemed an unlikely writer to tell this story, but he took on the task with an almost disturbing passion. He comes to Holcomb to tell a complete story, of the town, the victims, the police investigators, and, with astonishing sympathy, of the murderers themselves. We read about the town, a close-knit farming community on the prairie. The family is fairly comfortable, but not really rich. Herb Clutter was a pillar of the community, respected and admired. His wife had some psychological problems. The two kids were active, appealing and kind. The investigators were dogged and obsessed by the gruesome crime scene photographs that depicted not only brutal death, but a surprising gentleness on the part of the murderers. And the murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, what drove them to commit this crime? What were they like? How did their own actions haunt them, or did it bother them at all that they had killed in cold blood? Capote brilliantly weaves these various stories together in a moving and engrossing narrative. In the end, he also depicts the trial that these men got in Garden City, Kansas, a trial that in this telling, appears to have been broadly unfair. That unfairness drove long delays between conviction and execution as the murderers pursued appeal after appeal for a new trial.
This book is famous, also, because of Capote's legendary engagement with the story and with the murderers. He became involved with them, almost chummy as revealed in haunting photographs he had taken with them. But he also required their execution to have closure to his story. Men who had become his friends needed to die so that his "nonfiction novel" could be fully realized. Despite his involvement in the story, Capote's presence is largely hidden in the tale. He appears most explicitly in interviews with the muderers in their five-year stay on death row. He talks a great deal about the death penalty, relating along the way the stories of other prisoners and the nature of psychological evidence in trials of that day. We can not see what the author's opinion is of the death penalty, though he seems to deplore it while needing it to get a good story. Today, of course, death penalty appeals can take decades. In 1960, the average time between conviction and execution was just 17 months. Today, it is eight years. One can only imagine what Capote might have done if the story had, like the longest resident on death row, been drawn out to 33 years. The United States is a nation given to vengeance, no matter what pious convictions we otherwise try to express. Today there are more than 3200 people on death row. In 1960, there were 190. The death row population has grown at ten times the rate of the overall population. Maybe that's because residence on death row is so much longer. But, despite the evidence that the death penalty is not a deterrent (it certainly didn't stop Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, or any number of other murderers since), despite the fact that it costs us much more to house people on death row and defend against their appeals, despite the brutality it expresses about our culture, we persist in demanding vengeance for the crimes that offend us most. Capote invites us to think about such things in this compelling classic. He humanizes the inhuman. He paints an American portrait as complete and moving as any other in our literature. Along the way, he blazes a path of new journalism, in which the writers become part of the story in the pursuit of the human heart of the tale. He would be followed by others, such as Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe. In the end, he told a familiar tale in a new way, and changed the landscape of American literature in the process.
(This mini-review refers to the version of this book published in four instalments in The New Yorker magazine, September 25 - October 16, 1965.)
Also by Capote: [Breakfast at Tiffany's]