April 2024. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
1966, Vintage, 454 pages. Written in English, read in English.
Beware of Truman Capote’s writing, I’ve been warned — it’s very peculiar. But I, a veteran of Burgess and Kerouac here, and Burroughs and Becket elsewhere, was not perturbed. For In Cold Blood, in any case, the warning was unnecessary.
Some things need to be said about In Cold Blood first. It is a documentation of a real event, occurring in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959. It may have been one of the first “true crime” media pieces. And as such, it has elements of non-fiction, and elements of fiction, but it is neither. The narrative is rooted firmly in the non-fiction realm — all of the names are real, all of the places are real. Capote describes the perpetrators of the crime, and if you are unsure of what the description entails, you can just browse the internet for a picture that will qualify the description. You can read further about the crime and its consequences, about the trial and punishment, about the lives of the victims and the perpetrators, but you really don’t need to — Capote does a meticulous job of condensing everything that is important about this story to a very efficient, 454 page narrative.
In Cold Blood involves three groups of people, and Capote navigates between them throughout the book to tell the tale from all perspectives. On one side, we have the residents of Holcomb, especially the Clutters, a family of six, four of whom happen to be in the house on the fateful night; on the other side, the two perpetrators — Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, en route to a heinous crime, performing the crime and then fleeing, attempting to cross the border onto freedom and then returning to face their crime and their punishment. And in the middle, the investigators who invest every effort to determine the two most important questions pertaining to the event — the who, and the why.
[A short warning here: By now, the crime and the book that documents it are fairly famous, and you can find any breadth of information about it freely on the internet. I consider it a part of history that most people would have at least a fleeting acquaintance with; therefore I feel free to divulge details from the book. If you feel that this should be read as a thriller without knowing anything about the actual historical event, you should probably stop reading here.]
As with a lot of other heinous crimes with dire consequences, the why here is not very complex — the two perpetrators target the home of the Clutter family because one of them has been told by a fellow inmate who has worked there briefly, that the home owner keeps a large amount of money in a safe in his home office. The fellow inmate does not remember if it is true or not — the safe turns out not to exist, but the eponymous cold blooded murder of four family members is already in motion, and nothing can stop the mortal fate of six people.
Capote spends enough time to provide a deep inspection of all of the characters — the slain family members, whom Capote carefully makes sure to portray as having no skeletons in any closet, of being strictly victims of a crime of opportunity; the two perpetrators — diving into their childhood and youth, trying to find a reason for their actions even when one does not seem to exist; and the investigators, primarily Alvin Dewey, who desperately want to solve the crime and bring peace to the family and the town, and who despair at having so few clues for so long, eventually having a few lucky turns of event that almost bring the perpetrators to their doorstep.
Capote also spends time to describe the effect on the surrounding community — the boyfriend of a murdered daughter, her best friend, a community member whom the murdered father has endorsed and supported, the community at large and their fear of this being a harbinger of more crime and less security — and makes this one of the most effective narratives of how a mindless crime can wreak havoc on a whole community and affect, and harm, people further removed from the impact of the crime itself.
Having read this book, in which Capote balances the journalistic duty of reporting the facts with the literary art of making us care about all of the characters of the story — including the vicious murderers — I feel I am ready for Capote’s peculiar writing style in his other novels. Regardless of whether the prose itself will be undecipherable — I have the compass, the rosetta stone here in this book, to find his heart.
The May 2024 selection for the David Bowie Book Club will be Passing by Nella Larsen
