Daniel M. reviewed In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences on + 2 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
Capote's classic account of the Kansas murder said to be among the first 'literary journalism' genre.
Kelly D. (kelwood) reviewed In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences on + 7 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
Not my typical reading choice but found this eerily fascinating. Interesting character study of the two murderers.
Stacia R. (slrinvt) reviewed In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences on + 8 more book reviews
I never knew what Truman Capote was famous for, but after reading this book, it is clear. He should be one of the classic American authors that you have to read in school.
T.E. W. (terez93) reviewed In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences on + 323 more book reviews
This masterpiece is firmly on my Top Ten Books Everyone Should Be Required To Read in School. As such, I'm surprised that so few people have actually read it, which is nothing short of a travesty, particularly considering the times in which we live, which are replete with both tragic murders endlessly paraded before our eyes by mainstream media, and a plethora of substandard, salacious tell-all accounts written by shameless attention seekers looking for their own fifteen minutes of fame.
Capote's novel is decidedly different than most on offer today, with a few glaring exceptions, so it's beneficial to read the seminal work which set the standard, one that has rarely been achieved since. Admittedly, the subject matter is gruesome, but hardly out of the ordinary in terms of what we're now exposed to on a daily basis in the mainstream media. In short, this timeless American classic essentially founded an entire genre, that of True Crime. Other books had admittedly been written in the "non-fiction novel" type, but they achieved little of the success that Capote's magnum opus did, to the degree that the budding genre became one of the most popular in the US. In fact, Capote's is the *second* best-selling work of true crime writing of all time, second only to Bugliosi's "Helter Skelter" (1974) which chronicles his prosecution of the Manson Murders, a work which likely owes much of its existence to its illustrious predecessor.
It's hard to imagine that prior to the publication of Capote's novel in 1966, "true crime" novels really didn't exist. If this novel had not been so successful, and had not only set the standard but the framework for most subsequent works of this genre, I doubt that many subsequent ones, including "Helter Skelter" would have existed at all. Capote seamlessly incorporates the literary conventions of fiction writing with those of journalism, history, anthropology, forensics, and many other genres, which makes for an engaging if not heartbreaking account of this tragic event.
I'll keep the synopsis short, as most people are already familiar with the premise: in November, 1959, four members of a well-respected Kansas family were brutally murdered in their home: Herb Clutter and his wife Bonnie, both in their 40s, and their two teenage children, sixteen-year-old Nancy and fifteen-year-old Kenyon, both in high school. Herb and Bonnie had two other daughters who had already married and were living elsewhere. Unlike many other tragic crimes of this type, it appears that this was not a random attack: one of the killers had been cellmates with a man who had formerly been one of Herb Clutter's farm hands, who told him that Clutter kept large amounts of cash in a safe in the house, which was categorically untrue. In fact, it was well-known that Clutter never dealt in cash; he preferred to write checks for nearly everything, including for seemingly trivial amounts, as a way to keep track of expenditures.
After driving four hundred miles, the two killers arrived at the family's remote home in Holcomb, Kansas (which still stands today) about midnight, on the western side of the State, about 70 miles from the Colorado border. According to their later confessions, the pair had apparently already decided to murder everyone in the house, to avoid leaving any witnesses, which the first killer had mistakenly believed to constitute "the perfect crime." The pair entered the home through an unlocked door, and subdued the family. Enraged to learn that there was no actual money in the home, aside from some pocket change, the first killer strung up a bound-and-gagged Herb Clutter in the basement, slit his throat, then shot him in the head. The duo then killed the other three bound family members, each in a separate room, with a single shotgun blast to the head. They then left, with nothing more than a portable radio, a pair of binoculars, and less than $50 in cash. The second killer later reported that he had had to stop the other from raping sixteen-year-old Nancy before he murdered her.
An interesting twist is that the pair were also fingered for a similar "family annihilation," the Walker Murders, an as-yet-unsolved murder of four in Florida, where the pair were reported to have been at the time of the crime. After the Clutter killings, the drifters fled to Florida in a stolen car, and were seen on multiple occasions in Tallahassee and Miami around the time of the Walker killings. They had also reportedly shopped at a department store just a few miles from the home where the family was later killed.
The similarly brutal slaughter of the Walker Family (Cliff and Christine, along with their two young children, three-year old Jimmie and one-year-old Debbie) bore some eerie similarities to the killings in Kansas, to the degree that investigators had considered the pair suspects even in 1960. On December 19, 1959, Christine was accosted while returning home. She was subsequently raped and shot to death. Husband Cliff shortly thereafter arrived home with their two young children, barely more than infants, where he was ambushed and shot, as was Jimmie. Little year-old Debbie was shot also, but when that failed to kill her, she was drowned in the bathtub.
In 2012, the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office began formally investigating, and the pair were even exhumed from the Mount Muncie Cemetery to extract DNA samples from their bones, but the effort apparently wasn't successful. Reportedly, the DNA had degraded to the degree that it wasn't viable for comparison, so the case remains unsolved. It's unclear whether DNA from relatives of the pair could be used to determine whether either match the evidence collected at the scene. Other investigators, however, claim that evidence suggests that the murderer of the Walkers knew at least one of them, and that it seems that Christine was the actual target.
Regardless, the pair weren't on the run very long: as the Kansas crime became national news, the very man who in some ways was responsible, the prisoner who had been Herb Clutter's farmhand, contacted the warden and told him the identities of the likely culprits. In January, 1960, "Time Magazine" even published a piece on the murders. The pair were shortly thereafter identified and arrested in Las Vegas, only about a month later. Both eventually confessed, but, not surprisingly, each blamed the other as the party responsible for committing the actual killings. It didn't matter: both were found guilty of murder, after only about 45 minutes of deliberation by the jury, and were both sentenced to death for the crimes. After a series of appeals, they were also both executed by hanging on the same day, April 14, 1965.
Truman Capote became interested in this event after reading about it in the "New York Times," although he apparently had also read the "Time Magazine" piece about this unspeakable crime. He and his childhood friend Nelle Lee (AKA Harper Lee, Pulitzer Prize Winner and author of "To Kill a Mockingbird") traveled to Kansas to investigate, which initiated the beginning of an exhaustive research project, which forms the basis of the lengthy novel. Capote began publishing his copious research, drawn from some 8,000 pages of notes, as a serial in "The New Yorker" before publishing the final product in novel form.
It utilizes the so-called "triple narrative," which incorporates the stories of the victims, their killers, and the events surrounding the murders, including accounts of other involved persons, such as neighbors, friends, family members, media and law enforcement personnel. Capote also interviewed the killers, whose inconsistent accounts appear in this volume. The depth and breadth of the information contained within is impressive, but so is the description, which allows readers to relive the scenes, as heartbreaking and sometimes appalling as they are. The detailed description of the scenes make the account all the more accessible, relatable, and terrifying. Seemingly trivial details are anything but, as they enrich the narrative to a superlative degree: take, for example, the account of the two gray cats in Garden City, well-known as any other resident, who strolled along the street, checking out the bumpers of cars, looking for any birds which may have been unlucky to have a chance encounter with a car. What kind of research would have revealed those kinds of details!
This is a difficult book to read, on account of the heavy subject matter, but it's a superlative example of the genre, all the more impressive in that it didn't have many predecessors to serve as models. It is for that reason a highly-recommended read for literature fans of any descript.
Capote's novel is decidedly different than most on offer today, with a few glaring exceptions, so it's beneficial to read the seminal work which set the standard, one that has rarely been achieved since. Admittedly, the subject matter is gruesome, but hardly out of the ordinary in terms of what we're now exposed to on a daily basis in the mainstream media. In short, this timeless American classic essentially founded an entire genre, that of True Crime. Other books had admittedly been written in the "non-fiction novel" type, but they achieved little of the success that Capote's magnum opus did, to the degree that the budding genre became one of the most popular in the US. In fact, Capote's is the *second* best-selling work of true crime writing of all time, second only to Bugliosi's "Helter Skelter" (1974) which chronicles his prosecution of the Manson Murders, a work which likely owes much of its existence to its illustrious predecessor.
It's hard to imagine that prior to the publication of Capote's novel in 1966, "true crime" novels really didn't exist. If this novel had not been so successful, and had not only set the standard but the framework for most subsequent works of this genre, I doubt that many subsequent ones, including "Helter Skelter" would have existed at all. Capote seamlessly incorporates the literary conventions of fiction writing with those of journalism, history, anthropology, forensics, and many other genres, which makes for an engaging if not heartbreaking account of this tragic event.
I'll keep the synopsis short, as most people are already familiar with the premise: in November, 1959, four members of a well-respected Kansas family were brutally murdered in their home: Herb Clutter and his wife Bonnie, both in their 40s, and their two teenage children, sixteen-year-old Nancy and fifteen-year-old Kenyon, both in high school. Herb and Bonnie had two other daughters who had already married and were living elsewhere. Unlike many other tragic crimes of this type, it appears that this was not a random attack: one of the killers had been cellmates with a man who had formerly been one of Herb Clutter's farm hands, who told him that Clutter kept large amounts of cash in a safe in the house, which was categorically untrue. In fact, it was well-known that Clutter never dealt in cash; he preferred to write checks for nearly everything, including for seemingly trivial amounts, as a way to keep track of expenditures.
After driving four hundred miles, the two killers arrived at the family's remote home in Holcomb, Kansas (which still stands today) about midnight, on the western side of the State, about 70 miles from the Colorado border. According to their later confessions, the pair had apparently already decided to murder everyone in the house, to avoid leaving any witnesses, which the first killer had mistakenly believed to constitute "the perfect crime." The pair entered the home through an unlocked door, and subdued the family. Enraged to learn that there was no actual money in the home, aside from some pocket change, the first killer strung up a bound-and-gagged Herb Clutter in the basement, slit his throat, then shot him in the head. The duo then killed the other three bound family members, each in a separate room, with a single shotgun blast to the head. They then left, with nothing more than a portable radio, a pair of binoculars, and less than $50 in cash. The second killer later reported that he had had to stop the other from raping sixteen-year-old Nancy before he murdered her.
An interesting twist is that the pair were also fingered for a similar "family annihilation," the Walker Murders, an as-yet-unsolved murder of four in Florida, where the pair were reported to have been at the time of the crime. After the Clutter killings, the drifters fled to Florida in a stolen car, and were seen on multiple occasions in Tallahassee and Miami around the time of the Walker killings. They had also reportedly shopped at a department store just a few miles from the home where the family was later killed.
The similarly brutal slaughter of the Walker Family (Cliff and Christine, along with their two young children, three-year old Jimmie and one-year-old Debbie) bore some eerie similarities to the killings in Kansas, to the degree that investigators had considered the pair suspects even in 1960. On December 19, 1959, Christine was accosted while returning home. She was subsequently raped and shot to death. Husband Cliff shortly thereafter arrived home with their two young children, barely more than infants, where he was ambushed and shot, as was Jimmie. Little year-old Debbie was shot also, but when that failed to kill her, she was drowned in the bathtub.
In 2012, the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office began formally investigating, and the pair were even exhumed from the Mount Muncie Cemetery to extract DNA samples from their bones, but the effort apparently wasn't successful. Reportedly, the DNA had degraded to the degree that it wasn't viable for comparison, so the case remains unsolved. It's unclear whether DNA from relatives of the pair could be used to determine whether either match the evidence collected at the scene. Other investigators, however, claim that evidence suggests that the murderer of the Walkers knew at least one of them, and that it seems that Christine was the actual target.
Regardless, the pair weren't on the run very long: as the Kansas crime became national news, the very man who in some ways was responsible, the prisoner who had been Herb Clutter's farmhand, contacted the warden and told him the identities of the likely culprits. In January, 1960, "Time Magazine" even published a piece on the murders. The pair were shortly thereafter identified and arrested in Las Vegas, only about a month later. Both eventually confessed, but, not surprisingly, each blamed the other as the party responsible for committing the actual killings. It didn't matter: both were found guilty of murder, after only about 45 minutes of deliberation by the jury, and were both sentenced to death for the crimes. After a series of appeals, they were also both executed by hanging on the same day, April 14, 1965.
Truman Capote became interested in this event after reading about it in the "New York Times," although he apparently had also read the "Time Magazine" piece about this unspeakable crime. He and his childhood friend Nelle Lee (AKA Harper Lee, Pulitzer Prize Winner and author of "To Kill a Mockingbird") traveled to Kansas to investigate, which initiated the beginning of an exhaustive research project, which forms the basis of the lengthy novel. Capote began publishing his copious research, drawn from some 8,000 pages of notes, as a serial in "The New Yorker" before publishing the final product in novel form.
It utilizes the so-called "triple narrative," which incorporates the stories of the victims, their killers, and the events surrounding the murders, including accounts of other involved persons, such as neighbors, friends, family members, media and law enforcement personnel. Capote also interviewed the killers, whose inconsistent accounts appear in this volume. The depth and breadth of the information contained within is impressive, but so is the description, which allows readers to relive the scenes, as heartbreaking and sometimes appalling as they are. The detailed description of the scenes make the account all the more accessible, relatable, and terrifying. Seemingly trivial details are anything but, as they enrich the narrative to a superlative degree: take, for example, the account of the two gray cats in Garden City, well-known as any other resident, who strolled along the street, checking out the bumpers of cars, looking for any birds which may have been unlucky to have a chance encounter with a car. What kind of research would have revealed those kinds of details!
This is a difficult book to read, on account of the heavy subject matter, but it's a superlative example of the genre, all the more impressive in that it didn't have many predecessors to serve as models. It is for that reason a highly-recommended read for literature fans of any descript.
Tara T. (tarataylor) - , reviewed In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences on + 107 more book reviews
I've seen the movie, so I knew what happened, but I just didn't care for the writing of the book. I've read a lot of TC, and I just didn't like it very much.
Dawn M. reviewed In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences on + 13 more book reviews
Amazon.com:
In Cold Blood was a groundbreaking work when released in 1966. With it, author Truman Capote contributed to a style of writing in which the reporter gets so far inside the subject, becomes so familiar, that he projects events and conversations as if he were really there. The style has probably never been accomplished better than in this book. Capote combined painstaking research with a narrative feel to produce one of the most spellbinding stories ever put on the page. Two two-time losers living in a lonely house in western Kansas are out to make the heist of their life, but when things don't go as planned, the robbery turns ugly. From there, the book is a real-life look into murder, prison, and the criminal mind.
In Cold Blood was a groundbreaking work when released in 1966. With it, author Truman Capote contributed to a style of writing in which the reporter gets so far inside the subject, becomes so familiar, that he projects events and conversations as if he were really there. The style has probably never been accomplished better than in this book. Capote combined painstaking research with a narrative feel to produce one of the most spellbinding stories ever put on the page. Two two-time losers living in a lonely house in western Kansas are out to make the heist of their life, but when things don't go as planned, the robbery turns ugly. From there, the book is a real-life look into murder, prison, and the criminal mind.
