In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood- Truman Capote

How I found this book: I knew about this book because of the movie, part of which I caught on TCM one day, (Turner Classic Movies on US cable). I happened to be at Barnes and Noble last year looking at a discount table, and they had this and several other books on sale, several for like $20, so I got it thinking it might be interesting to read.

Setting: 19th Late 50’s, early 60’s Holcomb, Kansas. One of my friends actually grew up in the town of Garden City, which is where the family actually did attend church.

Main Characters:

Herbert Clutter: A wealthy rancher in Western Kansas, he is the patriarch of the Clutter family. He appears to be a good, honest man who people like working for and with, and who has built up a modest empire for himself.

Bonnie Clutter: Herbert’s wife, she suffers from severe depression.

Nancy Clutter: 16-years-old, she is a vivacious teenager with a steady boyfriend, who likes to ride horses. She’s good with housework and cooking, and seems excited about one of her older sister’s weddings in a few weeks.

Kenyon Clutter: 15-years-old, he likes to drive his vehicle out on the dunes of Western Kansas.

Dick Hickock: An ex-con who served time in the Kansas State Penitentiary for check writing, he hears about the Clutters from one of his cell mates, and convinces Perry Smith to go with him to the Clutter’s home because he’s convinced the Clutter’s are rich. He was once a promising athlete, but at the time of the murders worked as a mechanic and lived with his aging parents. He had been married, but divorced his wife.

Perry Smith: Another ex-con, Perry Smith led a roust-about. He meets Hickock in prison, but it’s after they both get out that Hickock hatches the plan to kill the Clutters. Smith helped Hickock kill the family, and the pair escaped to Mexico, then to Miami, before going to Las Vegas.


Plot: This is a real life story. The Clutters, a successful ranching family in Western Kansas, are brutally murdered by two-ex cons who were attempting to steal from the family. When it is discovered that the family doesn’t have money at the house, they steal what they can and return to Kansas City to pass off checks and sell their goods before high tailing it to Mexico. While the police are searching for every possible clue to find who could have murdered this respected family in cold blood, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock stay as far away as possible, until the law finally catches up to the pair in Las Vegas. After what is a sensational trial for the small, sleepy farming communities around Garden City, the pair is sentenced to Death Row, where they try to appeal the process. They eventually are executed by hanging in April 1965.

Themes:

A senseless murder: Truman Capote broke from his usual mold in writing what could be called the first ‘true crime’ novel written, differing from his purely fictional fair previously. Here he documents a senseless murder and seeks to find out why the men committed the acts that they did. There seems to be no clear reason for the murders, outside of greed, but Truman Capote goes into detail about why and how the men hatched the plot, what each of them thought about committing the crime, and what their remorse, if any was.

Crime in a small town: Those of us who live in big cities know that we tend to get de-sensitized to crime and murder all around us. But I grew up in a small town, and I remember what it was like to have anything happen out of the ordinary. Imagine what a brutal, quadruple murder will do to a town. It causes neighbor to start looking suspiciously at another neighbor, for people to clamor for justice to be done. Gossip flies fast and free. In small-town America these things are so rare it is shocking to the psyche there, and is less easily forgotten than in big cities. My friend who grew up there says they still talk about the murders now fifty years since they happened.

The ‘disenfranchised and disillusioned’: Smith and Hickock represent a growing number of people in the 50’s and 60’s that were becoming disillusioned and disenfranchised by the post-World War II society. Both of these young men are very different, Perry was raised in foster homes and by a reclusive father, while Dick actually grew up in a very normal, if poor home-life, resenting the fact that he wasn’t given all the things he thought he should get in life. Both men suffered from feeling outside of the mainstream, of feeling the need to strike back and take what they want, which they did in the most violent of ways.

The psychology of a killer: Both the psychologists who worked with Smith and Hickock and Truman Capote himself tried to discover WHY it was that two men would so willingly commit a completely senseless murder that turned up very little for them in the end. Capote shows for us the chilling details of their planning of the murder and their flight, and how neither shows any remorse really for what they have done, or what little is shown is very distant and doesn’t appear to be emotionally linked to them at all. We see here the murderers as sociopaths who have little to no understanding of the true ramifications of their actions outside of the ramifications to themselves.

Every book sucks somewhere: I have to say there is very little about this book that sucked for me. I think the suckiest part was that the murders had to happen at all.

What did I like: Truman Capote made this story engaging. Often with these ‘true crime’ stories either in book form or on television I become bored very quickly. By humanizing both the family and the murderers, he made you realize the true depth and scope of the tragedy, and that you saw that these were real people. Even Smith and Hickock came off as painfully human; taking away a lot of the ‘monster’ quality we associate with murderers in our society, and making them people that we can relate to. I think this aspect shows us how something like this happens, and how anyone could commit a crime just like this, given the circumstances and choices made.

How would I rate this wormy book: I would rate this as a MONSTER book, if nothing else to show how Truman Capote took his masterful story-telling technique and applied it to a real-life situation. Its pain and gut-wrenching at times, but it is a good read and it is interesting to see the anatomy of a murder displayed in such a manner.