Voices: Investigating 'In Cold Blood'

When the Clutter family was murdered in Holcomb, Kansas on November 15, 1959 with no trace of a suspect, chief investigator Alvin Dewey declared that in order to crack the case, his team had to “know the Clutters better than they ever knew themselves.”

Truman Capote adopted this goal for himself when he began to write his revolutionary non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood. The detail, the sensitivity to character and depth of setting, prove that he knew not only the Clutters, but their killers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith and the entire town of Holcomb better than they knew themselves. The detail of the portrait, the smoothness of all its edges, is really remarkable: the name of the movie Bobby Rupp and Nancy Clutter were planning to see on Sunday night, the direction the wind was blowing the night of the murder, Perry Smith’s dreams and Dick’s attitude toward Perry’s blood-shedding abilities. The book is so profoundly well-researched that it seems all to have sprung from the author’s mind.

It is both exhausting and mystifying to imagine the research that went into the book: how many hours of interviews, how many shoeboxes of cassette tapes, how many pages of letters, diaries, and newspaper clippings. And on top of the research time, there was also time spent getting to know Holcomb and gaining its trust. A down-to-earth, agricultural small town like Holcomb surely narrowed its eyes when Capote, a flamingly homosexual New York intellectual, waltzed in with hopes of writing about the recent tragedy that struck the community like lightning.

Yet it is clear that Capote did gain Holcomb’s trust, as well as the murderers’ trust, for without it, he would not have been able to develop such nuanced, fully breathing characters. The character development is impeccable, and humanizes the characters—particularly Perry and Dick—as only a master could. The first time we meet Perry (on page 14 in the Vintage International edition), he seems like an eccentric (he obsesses over maps and has a habit of staring trance-like into mirrors, to name a few quirks) but probably unthreatening fellow. We know he is waiting for Dick, but we do not know how they know each other or what their ultimate goals are. It is not until page 22 that we learn that they had celled together at Kansas State Penitentiary. At this point, Capote begins inserting hints as to the plan, such as Dick saying “I didn’t want him to see me taking the gun out of the house” or reminding Perry that “anyone they encountered would not live to bear witness.” Thus, the development of the murder plot is slow, and by the time the reader really understands what is happening, these other details of these two characters’ lives and personalities (Perry’s love of interesting words, Dick’s two marriages, Perry’s recurring dream of a giant parrot grasping him with his talons and flying away) have been filled in enough that they come off as humans, not just as murderers.

The one discrepancy in the book, the one irreconcilable break from reality, is the absence of Capote himself from the narrative. He makes one or two veiled references to a writer from New York, but otherwise, he is invisible, whereas we know from the depth of research that he must have been, in fact, a weighty presence in the town. But of course, changing the non-fiction novel to a first person narrative would have irrevocably altered the texture. As it is, In Cold Blood is a chillingly omniscient and perceptive examination of small-town America, the legal system, the criminally insane, and human characters who committed a gruesome murder.

--Emmaline Silverman