In Cold Blood

Must-read: Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, this genre-forming classic provides colourful insights into the criminal minds behind the gruesome murder of four innocent family members.

| By: Oliver Daddow | Published: Feb 24, 2026

 

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (London: Penguin Classics, 2000)

 

In Cold Blood was based on a series of four articles published in instalments when Truman Capote was a staff writer at The New Yorker in autumn 1965, put together in book form in 1966. Capote was a pioneer of the emerging “New Journalism”, using nonfiction narrative, or as Capote described it, “fact fiction”, to dramatise everyday life by imposing ‘fictional techniques on rigorously documentary material’. Capote was gripped by the bloody massacre, which took place on the outskirts of the remote farming town of Holcomb, west Kansas, 70 miles from the Colorado border – a religious town with a population of 11,000 and 22 churches (p258). Wealthy local farmer Herbert ‘Herb’ Clutter (48 years old) and three members of his family – his wife Bonnie (45 years old), youngest daughter Nancy (16 years old), and son Kenyon (15 years old)– were brutally killed on the night of 14 November 1959, in an apparently motiveless attack. The victims were tied at the wrists and ankles and shot in the head; in addition, Herb had his throat slit. The killers made off with just $40 and a portable radio. The Clutters’ two elder daughters lived out of town and survived, because they were not at the house on the night of the crime. The murders inspired widespread ‘amazement, shading into disarray; a shallow horror sensation’ (p68).

Capote first read about the case in the New York Times, and decamped from the east coast to spend time in Holcomb with his friend and fellow novelist Harper Lee, to gather material about the crime and the police investigation. The pair spent five years in and around the close-knit community (today’s crime reporters would get no such luxury), where they immersed themselves in village life, gleaning information from friends, shopkeepers, local businesspeople and members of the detective and legal teams who brought the killers to justice. When the murderers were finally caught, Capote spent time interviewing them in the local jail and on death row in Lansing prison, after sentencing. From reams of detailed notes made about their conversations, Capote worked up a series of long-form articles that recorded, in immense detail, the background to the case, the lives of the victims, how the investigation unfolded and how the spring 1960 trial (neither suspect gave evidence) culminated with a guilty verdict, following jury deliberations lasting just 40 minutes (p299). Capote finally documents the culprits’ final days and years on death row, as their lawyers went through several legal appeals based on detailed psychiatric evaluations, and urged a retrial to remedy an unsafe conviction (Part 4). Their appeals fell on deaf ears, and the culprits were eventually hanged on ‘The Big Swing’ in April 1965.

 

 

As the concept of ‘fact fiction’ suggests, ‘based on a true story’ or ‘adapted from real events’ are the ways to appreciate Capote’s style in In Cold Blood, which, imaginatively reconstructs real events to generate depth and sophistication to the story as it unfolds. Unsurprisingly, the facticity of the book has been hotly disputed over the years, despite the New Yorker’s proud claims to have fact-checked Capote’s material prior to publication. As with any work of history, the facticity of names and dates are one thing, and it is important from an authorial credibility perspective that Capote got them down accurately. However, it is important when reading the book to set aside Capote’s – surely knowingly provocative – claims to being factual throughout. Even the most avowed work of academic history rely on literary devices to connect the factual dots, and are forms of ‘fact fiction’ in everything but name (much as this annoys professional historians). For example, the book’s first part imagines conversations between members of the Clutter family on the day of the murder, before Capote was in town. Surely no one believes Nancy, Kenyon and their friends really spoke those words – but should it matter?

The whole point of the stylised factual fiction is to bring things to life in a fashion that tells us something about the characters involved. The final scene, set in the graveyard, is also well known to have been a Capote invention. Yet, taking it on its own terms, the immersive and, frankly, emotionally disturbing experience of reading the book was not diminished one iota, because I accepted the premise behind the emotional effect Capote was trying to achieve. Other, potentially more egregious factual errors discovered later, are more for the police themselves to answer to, than Capote himself. For example, the Wall Street Journal found that ‘that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation waited five days before following up on what turned out to be the crucial lead in the case, rather than doing so immediately, as Capote wrote’. My main worry with the process that went into the work was, in fact, ethical not factual. Apparently, Capote paid the two killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, $100 each (around $1,000 today). No criminal, especially not murderers, should ever profit from their crimes and this line was a far more serious one to cross, making the issue of the book’s facticity fade into the background.

The key point of interest for me was in discovering what motivated the two young men to kill four innocents so sadistically. Capote is more sympathetic to Smith than Hickock, which is ironic because Smith was responsible for all four killings. Hickock is said to have had a ‘bitter sediment at the bottom of his nature’ (p29) that caused him to feel jealousy towards others he felt were better off than himself: ‘Envy was constantly with him; the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have’ (pp193-4). While he served time in prison for passing off fraudulent cheques, Hickock had heard from a cellmate that Herb Clutter had a safe full of money – his motivation for the crime was financial gain. However, we also learn that Hickock also confessed to having a preference for underage girls – his two brides were both 16 years old at the time of the marriage (p211). Hickock in fact indicates that his principle motivation for going to the house was to rape Nancy Clutter. Smith did at least prevent this from happening.

Hickock identified Smith as ‘a natural killer – absolutely sane, but consciousless’ (p53). Other acquaintances of Smith corroborated that ‘The rights of other people mean nothing to Perry. He has no respect for anyone’ (p174). Smith’s stomach-churning description of how he killed Herb Clutter was particularly revealing of his dissociative outlook: ‘I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat (p237). Smith also told a long-time friend who visited him in custody, ‘the way it was, it was like picking off targets in a shooting gallery’ (p283). Professional evaluation had Smith’s ‘personality structure’ pinned as that of a ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ (p290), but it was not of a sufficient level to excuse his actions. Hickock and Smith thus forged a dangerous and deadly partnership – the ideas guy with a grudge against those seemingly happier or richer than himself, and the angry, dissociative character with a vengeful nature, who let his propensity for violence get the better of him when faced with four innocent victims who did not give the pair what they wanted.

Capote does not attempt, systematically, to justify the actions of Hickock or Smith – he is more interested in explaining what might have lain behind them, through a rich description of the murders, the murderers and their characters. Contextualised by autobiographies penned while in captivity, we gain rich insights into the dangerous minds behind one of the most shocking murders in Eisenhower’s America. I found narrative fiction a useful literary device for adding colour and fine detail to the overall story. Indeed, some of the scenes were stomach-churning, a reminder that writing about true crime can be as vivid as any television documentary (where we never see the act happening in any case). In getting behind the headlines to the heart of what motivated Hickock and Smith to act towards four innocent people, they had never met, with such violent abandon, we learn from Capote’s In True Blood that humans have a seemingly limitless capacity for evil, and it does not take much to flick the switch.    

Photos: author's own.