In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

The Work

Originally published as a four-part article in The New Yorker, In Cold Blood had made Truman Capote a millionaire and a national celebrity even before the book’s highly touted publication. Capote was fascinated by the mystery of the brutal, seemingly unmotivated 1959 murders of respected, prosperous Kansas farmer Herbert Clutter, his wife, Bonnie, and their two teen-age children, Nancy and Kenyon. Encouraged by New Yorker editor William Shawn, Capote followed the case for years, living in Kansas much of the time, interviewing scores of people (at first accompanied by his friend, the novelist Harper Lee), and eventually becoming confidant to Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, the two men convicted of the murders, as they waited on death row during a series of appeals. Capote became especially close to Smith, whose lonely childhood, physical self-consciousness, and artistic aspirations resonated with the writer. Published serially just months after the executions of Smith and Hickock, Capote’s project had accumulated unprecedented interest, partly because of its sensational subject matter but also because of Capote’s established literary reputation, his personal flamboyance, and his widely publicized claims that he was creating a paradoxical new literary form, the nonfiction novel. In 1967, Pax Enterprises/Columbia produced a film adaptation of In Cold Blood that closely follows Capote’s narrative design, his interest in the psychological makeup of the criminals (especially Smith), and his commitment to realism (director Richard Brooks even staged the murder scene at the Clutter’s home). However, the film omits much of Capote’s close, almost anthropological attention to the Clutter family’s small-town life, focusing instead on the flight and subsequent capture, trial, and execution of Hickock and Smith. As in the novel, the film waits until deep into the narrative to present the Clutter murders, which are “recalled” by Smith as a testimonial flashback. In contrast to Capote’s subtle rhetorical stance, Brooks adds the character of a reporter, who operates as the film’s conscience, questioning the morality of capital punishment, thus making explicit the implied irony of the title.

Impact

Although described as nonfiction on trade lists, In Cold Blood won the 1966 Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award. Capote’s precise methods would be almost impossible to replicate—he claimed a self-taught ability to recall and thus transcribe, with nearly perfect accuracy, hours of interview material and insisted that he had constructed his novel exclusively from observed or recorded detail—but his interest in blurred genres was shared by other novelists, journalists, and filmmakers committed to exploring American social life in new ways. Capote’s aggressive self-promotion and extravagant literary claims fostered a situation in which the use of fictional techniques in nonfiction forms and the ethics of making art (and money) from murder could be debated. The strong sense of “two Americas” that characterized In Cold Blood became emblematic of an increasingly polarized nation, split apart by suspicion, intolerance, and violence.

The film version of In Cold Blood was more revision than experiment, a solid, capably produced studio film in content reminiscent of the earnest social problem films of the 1950’s, driven by psychological explanation and liberal argument (in this case, against capital punishment), and in form characterized by moody, highly stylized black-and- white photography evocative of 1940’s film noir. Although sufficiently admired to have been nominated for four major Academy Awards—Brooks, for both Director and Original Screenplay; Conrad Hall, for Cinematography and Quincy Jones, for Original Musical Score—the film received none and was overshadowed in 1967 by another story of a criminal couple loosely based on fact: the more popular, more violent, more radical, and thus far more controversial